You’ve been told your whole life that taking on debt for an education is OK, because that education will land you a good job. The debt will be manageable. Your earning power will increase. University will be your pathway to social mobility.
Mon 7 Sep 2026 07.03 AEST
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If you were born after 1990 or so, you grew up during one of Australia’s great eras of prosperity.
And you were raised to believe that if you followed certain rules, you would eventually be a beneficiary of that prosperity too.
Get an education. Find a good job. Work hard. Save your money. Do all that, and you could expect to be better off than the generation before you.
But while you were growing up, things were changing.
By the time you got to school, the Howard government’s changes to the way private schools received funding were already having an impact on the public system. If you went to a state school, resources were already being restricted.
John Howard couldn’t get rid of Medicare. But his government introduced powerful financial incentives to push Australians towards private health insurance.
That has had impacts on universal health care. It has affected how quickly you can be treated and your access to services such as dental and optical.
You graduate high school and follow the expected path to university. Maybe you are the first in your family to go.
You’ve been told your whole life that taking on debt for an education is OK, because that education will land you a good job. The debt will be manageable. Your earning power will increase. University will be your pathway to social mobility.
Except now, an arts degree — one of Australia’s most popular and versatile degrees — can cost around $50,000.
And as the cost of university has risen, enrolments have fallen.
Between 2019 and 2023, overall domestic undergraduate enrolments declined by 4.1 per cent. If you are from a low-socioeconomic status background, the drop is even steeper: 9.6 per cent.
For students living outside a city, enrolments fell 12.5 per cent following the Morrison government’s Job-Ready Graduates package (changes the Labor government continues to delay resetting).
These steep fee structures mean young people now face a significantly higher financial barrier to university than the generation before them.
Then you graduate – and discover that wages haven’t kept up either.
Let’s say you graduated in 2022.
Three years into your career, the median salary you can expect as a professional is $91,000.
For someone who graduated in 2017, the median salary three years after graduating was $75,000. Adjusted for inflation, that’s equivalent to $92,132 today.
So despite earning more on paper, 2022 graduates are actually $1132 a year worse off in real terms in those first few years out of university.
And it doesn’t get much better as your career progresses.
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Professionals have lost $10,000 in purchasing power since 2020. In real terms, the average professional wage is now equivalent to what it was in 2009 — and worse again once income tax is taken into account.
All of this makes saving for a house deposit feel like an almost impossible dream.
It’s not the avocado on toast, or the fact you bought a new television – no matter what your parents tell you. It’s that you are not earning enough to keep up with house prices.
In fact, if you started saving up for a Sydney home in 2014, you needed $154,600 for a 20 per cent deposit on the median-priced house. Over the next decade, if you were on the average full-time male wage and put away around 15 per cent of your income, you might have managed to save $126,096. But by 2024, the deposit you needed had climbed to $281,500 — leaving you $155,404 short.
You’re expected to keep saving while your university debt repayments come out of your pay packet, limiting how much you have left to spend or save. Add private health insurance — which you may have taken out to avoid the financial penalty — and there’s even less left over.
What we are left with is a betrayed generation.
It’s a feeling shared across millennials and gen Z, although those born in the 1980s are still doing better than those born in the 1990s.
As Alan Kohler points out, for the first time since World War II, living standards in Australia are going backwards.
Economist Alison Pennington has previously called them Generation F’kd?
Now there’s another term being used: DUMPY — the Downwardly and Unhappily Mobile Professional Young — a sharp contrast to the YUPPIEs, or Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals, of the 1980s.
This is not wokeness, or whinging, or whatever else you want to put it down to. It’s the result of a system that is no longer delivering what it promised.
And these are the generations that now make up the biggest voting bloc in Australia. They are being held back by policies and settings that benefited the generations before them, but are no longer delivering the same opportunities.
The only saving grace is that the political power of those resisting change is diminishing. But that hasn’t made reform any easier. Instead, the debate has become increasingly focused on convincing younger Australians to defend a system that, unless they already hold significant wealth, is delivering less and less for them.
It’s not hard to see why people are so angry about their economic circumstances.
If those who followed the rules of prosperity — got an education, found a good job and earned a decent salary — still feel betrayed, where does that leave everyone earning less?
But it is increasingly difficult to see why politicians keep thinking they can ignore it.
Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute
This piece was first published in The New Daily. Read original here.
