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I’ve seen some things in various news outlets lately about the whole “American Dream” of doing better than your parents did and your kids doing better than you.
I don’t have kids, so I can only look back, not forward. But…

When I went off to college, my father took me aside and told me how much money he made per year.
“I think you should know this,” he told me.
I was never quite sure why. But, it gives me a measure of where he was doing then.
My wife and I have been married 24 years. So, where we are now is comparable for someone who might have an 18 year old child going off to school.

At the time I started engineering school, my tuition was 12% of that number my father told me for his income. He and my mother had assured me that they had been saving money for it since I was 4 and I didn’t have to worry about it.
Plus I had some student loans and a scholarship that covered about half of my tuition.
(That didn’t last long. The next year I no longer qualified for loans and my mother spent the savings to go to Hawaii, but that’s another story…)

Three dozen years later, I look at where I am compared to back then.
My father was an engineering manager then. I am an engineering manager now. I’m still a dozen years younger than he was then, but I don’t really expect any major changes in my pay unless things change a lot.

Unadjusted for inflation, I make 91% more than my father did then.
But, according to the federal inflation information, those 36 years have had 263% worth of inflation.
So, instead of making 191% of my father’s income, I made only 72% of it.

Until my brother started college, a few years after me, my mother didn’t work.
But, my wife’s does.

If you factor in our combined salary, it is 102% of my father’s adjusted salary.

So, the two of us combined make what my father made alone 36 years ago.

Looking back at my old engineering school, I find its tuition is up 610% from 3 dozen years ago.

So, what was 12% of my father’s income for my tuition would be 39% of mine. Or, 28% of the combined between me and my wife.
(That’s just tuition. Not room and board, books, fees or any of that other stuff.)

I would need to make 3 times what I do for tuition to be the same percentage of my income as my father faced 36 years ago.
That kind of income is just not on an engineering career path.

According to Glassdoor, R&D manager is one of the top 5 jobs for income. I’m below the listed median, but I think I can get there with some work.
So, I’m on one of the best tracks and it still isn’t going anywhere near what it would take to have tuition the same proportion of our income.

By having 2 people working instead of 1 and not having kids to put through school, my wife and I hit that target of doing as well or exceeding my parents.
But, only just.