The debt bomb warning comes from William Brewer, head of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. Unfortunately, there isn’t much bankruptcy lawyers can do for people seeking relief from education debt, on account of the various laws passed since the 1970s making sure education debt stays inescapable. And it’s not just rotten spoiled kids who are suffering!

College seniors who graduated with student loans individually owed an average of $25,250, up 5 percent from the previous year, according to a study by Brewer’s group. Parents are responsible, on average, for $34,000 in student loans, a figure that rises to about $50,000 over a standard 10-year repayment period. An estimated 17 percent of parents whose children graduated in 2010 took out loans, a 5.6 percent increase from 1992 and 1993.

But once you graduate, your incredible earning power will make paying those loans back a breeze, right? I mean, maybe, if you graduated with a degree in “my parents own a bank.” The good news is that a little bit more than half of the class of 2010 got a job by the spring of 2011, and the median starting salary for students graduating from four-year colleges has only declined about 10 percent since the mid-2000s! (Sorry, not “good news.” I mean “the additional worrying indicators.”)

Of the employed recently graduated, a larger number than ever had decided to go for a lucrative career in “food service,” where they can expect to make sub-minimum wage and have no healthcare or job security, just like all the non-college educated workers currently enjoying the freewheeling service industry lifestyle.

In a piece for Good magazine that I highly recommend for old people and bad tippers, Nona Willis Aronowitz explores Generation Y’s love affair with degrading, poorly compensated work. The relevant statistics:

Some depressing facts: Nearly half of people ages 16 to 29 do not have a job. A quarter of those who do work in hospitality—travel, leisure, and, of course, food service. A study of 4 million Facebook profiles found that, after the military, the top four employers listed by twentysomethings were Walmart, Starbucks, Target, and Best Buy. The restaurant industry in particular is booming; one in 10 employed Americans now work in food service—9.6 million of us. Those numbers are growing each year. Even though more and more laid-off, middle-aged Americans are turning to restaurant jobs, as of 2010 about two-thirds of food service workers are still under age 35. And the industry’s workforce is more educated than it was just 10 years ago. In major U.S. cities, about 9 percent more food service workers have been to college.

Aronowitz also tells the tale of the ongoing fight to unionize Minneapolis locations of Jimmy John’s, a Midwest sandwich chain. Unfortunately, unionization of the restaurant industry faces some very steep hurdles: Workers from middle-class backgrounds always think their crummy job situations are temporary, and those with working-class or working-poor roots are scared to do anything to jeopardize their jobs. Profit margins are slim, workers are easily replaceable, and the major unions don’t have the wherewithal or the resources to engage in mass organizing.

The fact that the children of the middle class, and not just the easily forgettable poor, might be stuck in this kind of work for the long haul might eventually lead to reforms, but in the absence of a functioning food service labor movement, it’s hard to see where the reforms might actually come from.

But don’t worry! Sanctimonious, out-of-touch haves will never give up the fight to prove that every single horrible national trend afflicting young people is actually a result of the moral failings of said young people! Just ask Todd Buchholz, former George H. W. Bush economic avisor, and his daughter Victoria, a student of some kind. In their much-emailed New York Times Op-Ed on how kids today refuse to get drivers licenses because Bruce Springsteen started putting out depressing music in the 1990s, the Buchholzes demand to know why, if it’s so hard to get a job, kids today don’t pack up and move to North Dakota, where unemployment is currently low. (Victoria Buchholz, for the record, attends Cambridge, not NDSU.) This generation’s refusal to act as interchangeable units of labor and their constant misuse of the word “random” are both related, and worrying, signs of America’s decline.

Get off Facebook and go to North Dakota to extract some oil from shale! Right now! Following a natural resource boom to a currently sparsely populated region has always worked for everyone throughout history. If by the end of this winter you aren’t engaging in hydraulic fracturing by day and sleeping in your car by night because there is no affordable unoccupied housing in North Dakota, you have no right to complain about the massive destabilizing generational shifts in job availability and security that have forced you to prolong your dependence on your similarly debt-burdened parents or else rely indefinitely on a series of menial service jobs!

(How come no one ever asks if maybe it’s North Dakota’s fault that no one wants to live there?)

I feel truly uncomfortable and unaccepted in his presence and cannot deal with the way he patronizes me in conversation and blatantly excludes me from certain activities. I often leave the room when he comes in and try to avoid situations that include him. Unfortunately, he has recently become a huge part of the social life on our floor and has befriended many of my best friends in big ways. They have been spending a great deal of time with him, genuinely enjoy his company, and are excited about their new friendships with him. Because I can’t be around him, I miss out on so many experiences with my floor and can feel my friends slipping away.

I feel like he is taking over a life that I have built for myself here. Furthermore, I feel insecure and terrible about the fact that I am the only person he has such a hard time being nice to. To everyone else he is open and kind, but I get the short end of the stick. I want desperately to be able to maintain my friendships and enjoy college life, and it feels like he is standing in my way and changing the atmosphere on my floor in a way that is only negative to me. He also has been bringing his friend around a lot who seems to equally dislike me. I don’t understand and I’m angry and annoyed at this person for deconstructing my social life. The worst part is, I don’t think he even notices or cares how miserable he makes me. It feels as though he has this power to make me feel incredibly uncomfortable by doing very little. I feel so trapped. If I keep avoiding him and hating him, I exclude myself. But if I choose to hang out around him, he makes me feel like crap. How can I deal with this? Why does he drive me so nuts? Please help, Cary.

Stuck Under His Thumb

Dear Stuck,

I suggest you use your Mental Photoshop to erase this man from the picture, the way the Soviets used to do.

When you are in a group, do not look at him or speak to him. Speak to others. Concentrate on your friends. Don’t make a big show of it. Just act as if he isn’t there. Bring your field of awareness into yourself and your friends, the people you like and are drawn to. You don’t have to leave. Be there but do not speak to him or look at him. Focus only on your friends. Remove him from the picture.

Here are some examples of how to do this.

Eliminating people from the picture.

11 Famous Doctored Photos of Dictators.

Mental Photoshop as a travelogue medium.

Now, eliminating him completely from your awareness may be hard at first — like what happens when someone says, “Don’t think about the elephant.” But if you keep at it, you may begin to enjoy it.

If, however, after a month or so you find you cannot eliminate him from your conscious world then it is remotely possible that you actually have some kind of crush on him. This is a clichéd thing in the movies but it happens in real life, too. It wouldn’t be the first time that a person was attracted to somebody she couldn’t stand. Sometimes it turns out that we don’t care about the person himself but he represents something. So it gets complicated.

But start with just eliminating him from all your pictures. That’s the simplest solution.

Remember: You are Stalin. Your dorm is the Soviet Union. And he is someone who unfortunately did not live up to expectations.

Will Bunch highlighted the… slightly dubious claim, as reported by a Detroit CBS affiliate (emphasis Bunch’s):

“I’m very careful about the colleges and universities our children go to,” Santorum said. “There are schools, I went to one — Penn State — that’s one of the liberal icons, unfortunately it’s gotten a lot worse. I can tell you professor after professor who docked my grades because of the viewpoints I expressed and the papers that I wrote, there’s no question that happened.”

“Your grades suffered because of your views at Penn State?” Langton asked

“Absolutely, absolutely,” Santorum said. “I used to go to war with some of my professors, who thought I was out of the pale, these are just not proper ideas. This is not something that’s not unusual, folks, I know this may be a surprise to some people … There is clearly a bias at the university.”

Liberal icon Penn State. It’s central Pennsylvania’s own Frankfurt School, really.

Santorum hasn’t released his college transcripts, so we can’t know how bad his grades were, but according to the New Republic and the Philadelphia City Paper Santorum was actually not that conservative in college. (Or maybe he was hiding it to escape the vicious persecution conservatives suffered at Penn State in the late-1970s?)

Santorum’s Penn State experience was so traumatizing that he remained a fan of the football team and called himself a “friend” of longtime coach Joe Paterno as recently as last November.

Santorum’s claim is pretty obviously just an attempt to add a dose of self-proclaimed victimization to the anti-elite tack he’s been taking with his recent focus on the dangers of higher education, but it’s a silly one, considering that, well, he is talking about Penn State, not Penn or something. But Santorum’s entire “college is awful” tour has been a bit of a puzzler.

Now I don’t have a highfalutin’ “degree” from some fancy “college,” unlike Rick Santorum, who has three, but I do know that a lot of people seem to think “education” is a good thing. I know this because I read an article in which a guy from the Pew Research Center explained that nearly all American parents hope their children will attend college.

Anti-college talk is a fine rhetorical strategy when your target is snobbery against adults without college educations, but basically all parents — even blue collar parents who work with their hands like real Americans — want their kids to get degrees and good jobs because that is part of “the American dream.”

This is conservative class warfare totally backfiring, basically. Maybe Santorum’s grades were actually docked because he is dumb?

Rising tuition and fees are making up the shortfall. This year, the average hike is 8.3 percent. New York’s state university system is increasing tuition 14 percent; Arizona, 17 percent; Washington state, 16 percent. Students in California’s public universities and colleges are facing an average increase of 21 percent, the highest in the nation.

The children of middle and lower-income families are hardest hit. Remember: The median wage has been dropping since 2000, adjusted for inflation.

Pell Grants for students from poor families are falling further behind; they now cover only about a third of tuition and fees. (In the 1980s, they covered about half; in the 1970s, more than 70 percent.)

Student debt is skyrocketing – the New York Federal Reserve Bank estimates it at $550 billion. Punitive laws enforce repayment, and it’s almost impossible to shed student loans in bankruptcy. There is no statue of limitations for non-repayment.

Santorum’s rant notwithstanding, good-paying jobs in America are coming to require a college degree. Globalization and rapid technological change are putting a premium on the ability to identify and solve new problems. A college degree is also a signal to prospective employers that a young person has what it takes to succeed.

That’s why the median annual pay of people with a bachelor’s degree was 70 percent higher than those with a high school diploma in 2009 (the latest Census data available).

Yet public higher education isn’t just a private investment. It’s a public good. Our young people — their capacities to think, understand, investigate, and innovate — are America’s future.

We used to understand this. During the great expansion of public higher education from the 1950s to the 1970s, tuition at public universities averaged about 4 percent of median family income (compared to around 20 percent at private universities).

Young Americans received college degrees in record numbers – creating a cohort of scientists, engineers, managers and professionals that propelled the economy forward and dramatically expanded the middle class.

But starting in the 1980s, as in so many other areas of American life, we took a U-turn. Tuition at public universities began climbing. By 2005, it was more than 10 percent of median annual family income. Now it’s approaching 25 percent – still a good deal relative to private universities (where it’s nearly 70 percent), but high enough to discourage many qualified young people from attending.

Public higher education has been the gateway to the middle class, but that gate is shutting – just when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been since the 1920s, and when America needs the brainpower of its young people more than ever.

This is nuts.

What’s the answer? Partly to make public universities more efficient. Every bureaucracy I’ve ever been associated with (and I’ve been in some very big ones) has some fat to be trimmed. Yet universities are necessarily labor-intensive enterprises; research and teaching can’t be outsourced abroad or turned over to computerized machine tools.

Another part of the answer is to raise tuition and fees for students from higher-income families and use the extra money to subsidize medium and lower-income kids. Even now relatively few pay the official sticker price; many receive some discount proportional to family income. But this won’t solve the underlying problem, ether.

A big part of the answer has to be more government support for public education at all levels. This requires more tax revenues – especially from Americans who are best able to pay.

Most Americans still believe in the ideal of equal opportunity. And most harbor the patriotic notion that we have responsibilities to one another as members of the same society.

The two principles lead to an obvious conclusion: America’s richest citizens have a duty to pay more taxes so kids from middle and lower-income families have chance to make it in America.

As a professor, I’ve always treated my students as autonomous beings, telling them on the first day of class that I will not follow up with them on missed classes or assignments as other instructors might. It’s my tough love way of getting them to become independent thinkers and to do for themselves.

But I can’t help contrasting that to the way their parents treat them. In Allison’s senior year of high school, parents rolled their eyes over filling out their sons’ and daughters’ college applications, expecting commiseration from me. I smiled and nodded and hoped my face didn’t show the absolute incredulity I felt. Didn’t they see the disservice they were doing their children? Two years later when my daughter Hayley graduated, the situation was worse. Parents would use the word “we” — as in, “We’re looking at Rutgers,” or “We’re thinking he should take a year at community college until we figure out what he should focus on.” My parents didn’t see my college campus until they came to visit. My roommate and I drove ourselves to orientation, and we still laugh remembering how we ended up a state further south, forced to ask a toothless gas station attendant in Virginia where we were.

College is a perfect middle ground for this age group: Students are forced to make their own choices and take responsibility for them, but help and guidance are there if they need it. What I see, though, is that the self-reliance they should be developing is thwarted by parental involvement. An academic advisor at Drexel told me the other day what she is most surprised by is how students “tolerate parental interference.” Even worse, “They want and ask their parents to come to advising meetings.” I know a mother who watches the surveillance cams at her child’s school, for hours, hoping he will randomly walk past the camera’s corner. I know a mother who requests her college-age children’s syllabuses, puts exam and project dates in her own calendar, and sends her children reminders. I know a mother who checks her kid’s debit card daily, and then calls him and questions 3 a.m. pizza purchases. My daughters are on the same campus as me, and I don’t even know what classes they are taking. But so far, they come to me with the stuff that’s more important than any 3 a.m. pizza purchase or chem quiz, and I think they do because I give them space.  I let them make that choice.

I wonder if the parents so anxiously hovering, just trying to do their best, understand the twisty ways their students hide from them. Many students tell me they have fake Facebook pages, ones they use only for their parents, and “real ones” for their friends.  The decision over whether to “friend” a parent is a never-ending source of antagonism. The stories of kids getting “busted” in red cup photos are far too numerous to reiterate.

As much as parents use technology to peek in on their young adult children’s lives, students also use technology to remain dependent on their parents and avoid the hard work and sacrifice of growing up. They tell me about texting their parents with requests for cash, and parents using online banking to make the transfer. One student was proud that he conducted this whole text conversation as he walked to the bar where he intended on spending the deposit. His mother texted back “done” when the transaction was complete, just as he opened the door to the bar.

Parents have a view into their children’s lives that was not possible in the past. That makes letting go virtually impossible, forgive the pun. I spoke with a mother recently who said if it were not for Twitter, she wouldn’t know if her college junior son was dead or alive.  He is at Penn State, and in his freshman year, a fellow student was found in a stairwell, dead from alcohol poisoning. He had been dead for almost two days. She thinks this made her extra leery, and on the day we spoke he had been diagnosed with strep throat but hadn’t responded to any of her texts, so she found herself obsessively checking her Twitter feed, only able to relax and focus on her work when she saw he had put up a post.

I’m not immune to this, either. The other night I was wondering about the whereabouts of my own college freshman and willing myself not to text her. I picked up my phone when I heard a buzz, and lo, Hayley had checked into a restaurant on 4Square. Phew. But I am doing my best to maintain balance.

Trying to think of a new metaphor for my ideal style of parenting, I decided I want to be one of those guys on the landing strips at the airport, with the flags. I am on the ground, and my kids come see me when they need something and I direct them, but they are still operating the plane. I also decided that was a lot of words and I needed to find out what those people in the bright jumpsuits are called. After much unproductive googling, I contacted my air traffic controller cousin and this is what he wrote back:

“That position is called a ‘Ramp Agent.’ They do everything from guiding the plane into its gate, loading and unloading bags, cleaning the inside of the cabin, and just about anything else needed to get a plane ‘turned around’ and ready for its next flight.”

Perfect.

The code I have developed with my own daughter is this: If I haven’t heard from her in a few days, or if I just have an ache for her, I will send her a text that says, “Say ‘hi.’” She will respond with those two letters and it is astounding, really, how much better I feel.

I think we’re all more afraid in 2012, and that technology can both relieve and feed those fears.  I’m not accusing anyone of being a bad parent. The only reason we panic when we haven’t heard from our child for three days is because we can, and often do, hear from him or her nearly constantly. But learning to respect boundaries is part of this process, and we have to do it, even when technology has erased the lines. This is the same moderation and balance we want our kids to learn as they navigate the bumpy freedoms of adulthood. Just because you have access to all the alcohol you can drink doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can shut off your alarm and roll over without any immediate ramifications doesn’t mean you should.

That’s the lesson we parents have to learn. Just because we can peek in on our children, doesn’t mean that we should. Just because you can see that your child has not swiped in at the Dining Center but instead bought $12 worth of snacks at the campus bodega, do you need to know that information? Would you tell your vegan friend that you polished off a family-size bag of Doritos last night, texting her that information as soon as you sucked the orange dust off your fingertips? I am going to do my best to stay a ramp agent and try not to helicopter, waving my flags on the tarmac — even if sometimes that waving gets frantic.