It appears that when young people graduate from college, their standard of living often declines, even if they are employed. This is odd, since productive people should not be living worse than people who are not yet productive. Parents and the government "invest" a lot of money in college education, but much of the investment is actually consumption. Subsidizing the consumption of young adults is reasonable to some extent (they were subsidized for the first 18 years too), but a pattern of 4 years of heavy subsidization followed by a financial cut-off may be suboptimal.