The canard is that you've accepted that there's a "primary message" of "do what you love" or "the-world-is-your-oyster" without showing how it has actually affected society. I argue that the perception of such a message has had nothing to do with any of youth's current economic woes.

It completely sidesteps the real issues. Let's say nobody told any young child of the 80s and 90s that they were special and the entire job market shifted on them anyway. They'd still be living at their parents' house, because they have no jobs, high debt and not much of a financial independence ahead of them. It's a logical thing to do when your parents have stable incomes and you do not.

Please read through my other comments in this thread, but my point is that the entire market shifted, which we agree on. Where I disagree, and frankly, get really annoyed about, is placing the blame on how these students were raised for wholly unrelated economic trajectories.

This has nothing to do with expectations and everything to do with realities. Realities that are being dealt with by boomeranging.

As for "WHY do these kids have high debt and low wages," I've also discussed, but blaming debt-to-wage ratio for choice of study seems bizarre to me when the problem is school is more expensive than ever and jobs are scarcer than ever, especially for recent graduates. They have high debt and low wages because they have high debt and low wages. An ontology, for sure, but just as likely a vicious cycle: One must have a degree to get a good job in one's chosen field, but having a degree may no longer advance one's position and yet, not having a degree could be far worse.

As noted throughout this thread, students have been choosing essentially the same degrees for decades, regardless of job prospects in those fields. The things that changed to create the boomerang problem (assuming we see it as a problem), are all outside of those choices: increasing education costs, poorer job prospects across nearly all fields, etc. etc.

If job prospects were related to field of study, you'd expect to see shifts in completed degree fields over the years, but we don't.

So back to the "primary message," as you put it. Was it inherent in that message that students get similar degrees as boomers and Gen Xers? It worked for them just fine. Why wouldn't it work for their kids? Seems hardly criminally negligent or idiotic to me and, again, it's completely unrelated to the real economic reality. To me, that framing sounds a lot like "kids these days" and doesn't isn't helpful at all, especially when it appears "kids will be kids" seems the more apt cliche to use when talking about choice of degree.