While students on America’s college campuses are locked in intense debates over gender-neutral pronouns and inclusive bathrooms, they seem far less attuned to the national crises that will define their futures: the soaring national debt and a collapsing social safety net.
The national debt continues to grow largely unnoticed by students. The U.S. debt now exceeds $37 trillion, and interest payments just to service it are projected to surpass defense spending—$874 billion in 2024—within a few years. This burden will shape the economic future of today’s college students far more than any cultural war.
If the debt continues rising at its current pace, it will limit the government’s ability to invest in education, healthcare, job programs, and more. Yet many students don’t realize that every dollar borrowed today will eventually land on their shoulders—through higher taxes or reduced benefits.
Just as pressing is the future of Social Security, the program that many young workers pay into through payroll taxes but may never fully benefit from.
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More than 55 million Americans rely on Social Security, the federal government’s largest program at $1.5 trillion in 2024. Yet the system is projected to become insolvent by the mid-2030s, triggering automatic benefit cuts of 21 to 25 percent unless Congress intervenes.
The math is simple: people live longer, fewer children are being born, and the worker-to-retiree ratio has collapsed—from 15:1 in 1945 to fewer than 3:1 in 2022. That imbalance makes full benefits for future retirees increasingly unlikely.
Today’s college students could spend their entire working lives funding a safety net that won’t exist for them. For a generation already burdened by student debt and rising living costs, that should be cause for real alarm.
Students—myself included—need to be far more engaged in these debates. We are the ones who will inherit the country’s fiscal future.
If we can’t summon as much passion for the nation’s balance sheet as we do for pronouns, we may wake up in an America where the arguments that consumed us matter far less than the bills we can’t pay.
Image by zimmytws on Adobe; Asset ID#: 176406827
