The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.
Yet another reason this is insanely revisionist is that it pretends the whole reason millennials felt so much pressure to go to college wasn't that conservative politicians had spent the eighties and nineties wrecking the shit out of labor unions to the point that by the time millennials turned eighteen, it was suddenly a lot harder to count on being able to work at a working-class job all your life and still have a good living.
College, all of a sudden, went from "something I'd like to do if I can get in" to "a lifeline in an economy where blue collar jobs are going to shit."
The wheel's turned long enough that now college students are being treated the way union workers and union-adjacent workers were treated in the eighties and nineties, so now college grads are the ones that it's fashionable to shit on, and the new fix-all solution is supposed to be "go into the trades!" Which means that by the 2050s at the latest, we'll be coming up with some new lie to blame people in the trades for the fact that now they're in trouble. And we'll have some new job that everyone should have been doing instead.
