I'm in tech, and am not really complaining for myself. But non-STEM folks are having a pretty tough time. The digital age has devastated non-STEM fields and majors. There was a time when getting an English or History degree from a respectable university opened a wealth of opportunities. Now they're more likely to be found selling shoes or making my coffee. My mother, a sweet 55 year old woman who never attended college, is the accounting manager for a business with tens of millions per year in revenue.
How? She was given secretarial work in the 70's and slowly clawed her way up while raising 3 kids, and was even lucky enough that her 7 years out of the work force in the early 90's when we were young didn't affect her career trajectory very much.
The possibility of this happening nowadays is slim to none. You need a degree to even be looked at for a lot of office work these days, and you can be sure you're not going to be promoted when they can bring in someone younger, with a degree relevant to their business sector, willing to work for less to fill any positions you could potentially be considered for. This also applies to lots of liberal arts majors as well as just high school students.
It also doesn't help that for as long as I can remember, my teachers, parents, and counselors have told me, my siblings, my friends, my classmates, and my generation that we should follow our passions and dreams, and success will follow. Luckily I like math, science, computers, and I've been a bit of a geek since I was a toddler, so I fell into my, coincidentally, highly-in-demand CS degree quite naturally. The same cannot be said of the bookish history, literature, or philosophy nerds I know.
There is blame all around, but from my perspective it seems like a lot more of it lay at the feet of our forebears than us.
But hey, at least us computer geeks have it good, eh?
