School is often a competitive environment where there's an emphasis on the achievement of milestones, such as graduating with a high GPA, and earning degrees from prestigious colleges or universities. The implicit threat used to motivate students to endure and accept hardship, which some parents and teachers actually still say out loud, is that if students don't meet the measures of success set for them in a timely fashion, they will be relegated to a substandard mode of existence. There is, of course, some truth in this, but it's arguably because civic engagement has been virtually erased from primary school curricula. The private sector of the economy has enjoyed generations of a populace that doesn't know their rights, doesn't know how to advocate for themselves and others in the workplace, doesn't understand labor or how to organize it, and doesn't have the resources or knowledge to start their own businesses. Because of this, there are far fewer viable paths to meaningful, lucrative working-class careers and financial self-sufficiency than ever before. Instead, people juggle a collection of unstable side-hustles. Education is seen as a way out of this depressing state of affairs, but even people with advanced degrees sometimes resort to the gig economy to help pay off their student loan debt. Only a repressive, anti-intellectual regime would allow citizens to be saddled with such a burden just for trying to be informed members of society.