New Gallup and Lumina Foundation data find that roughly two-thirds of Gen Z student borrowers have postponed a major life event — homeownership, marriage, children — because of debt. The historical parallel is precise: the G.I. Bill (1944) was designed to prevent exactly this dynamic, using federal subsidy to convert military service into accessible higher education and the downstream wealth-building that follows. What the postwar generation received as a public investment, Gen Z is receiving as a trillion-dollar liability — and the Gallup crosstabs show the deferral effect weakens with each older generation, meaning the burden is not evenly distributed across time but concentrated on the cohort that arrived after the bipartisan consensus on public higher-education funding collapsed in the 1980s. Wage garnishment for borrowers in default has now resumed after the pandemic pause, adding a coercive collection mechanism to a structural financing failure.