Education used to mean something great, you would get a good job after graduating, and after a few years you would be able to support yourself and if your wife worked as well you would have a decent middle income family household. However, these days people are barely surviving with the current market conditions, you could have a ton of workload, 80 hours a week, your wife could be the same and you would barely afford a vacation.
I have been earning 4 times more than what minimum wage worker earn in my country, and I have been living a medicore life at best. This month has been specially terrible, I paid off some debts, and this caused me to have less than what I normally have, which shows that you could be considered a "rich" person in my nation when you have no debt, that is the ceiling, literally having no debt makes you rich, that is not what we think when we consider rich people normally.
That is not just entirely based around education, yes it is right that back in the day education was harder to get, and a college degree was something more valuable back in the day, that's true. Even a high school graduate could have ended up with a good job and worked to get a good life.
However, what got worse is not related to just education, these days people who graduated from masters, college, high school all getting terrible deal in life because economy sucks in almost every nation. I do not know what we are going to do, but I know that the whole world is having financial trouble and some are worse but nobody is doing well. Only the very very wealthy is doing well, rest are doing worse, no matter what their education is.