Old Economy Joe

I went to a "crappy state school" (where one could get a perfectly good education, as is the case at all these places) in Pennsyltucky. I graduated into the end of a recession. "Marrying your college sweetheart" was a pretty normal thing people did back then, though that changed pretty quickly not long after I graduated (median age of first marriage really start climbing in the early 90s).

I went to grad school, but most of my peers didn't. I don't have full knowledge of the lives of everybody I went to school with (no facebook then!), but a pretty standard path was "graduate, flail a bit before getting a shitty first job, get a somewhat better second job, get married and buy a house by 23-24." Also, tuition, room, and board came in just under 5 grand my first year. We'd gone beyond "pay for it with a summer job" by then, but not by all that much.