You described my parents that were born in the 1910s. Not me, I was born in 1953.

While in high school, my high school friends were arguing about which would have a better job for life. Generically they were arguing about which was best, a railroad union job or working on the assembly line at the Ford plant, or working as a printer. In the 1970s, those were the good jobs like you described. My high school friends that did get a good union job on the railroad, or the Ford plant assembly line, or the job running a big offset press got a good start but many were early in their career when their career cratered. The expected pension from their union career never happened when their jobs disappeared, some lost their homes. They are not the boomers you just described.

I was luckier than them, but I had bad timing. I got my second college degree at the same time that Reagan and Volker intentionally tanked the economy and ran unemployment up into two digits in the early 1980s. The university placement office did not publish job offer statistics for degrees unless there were at least five job offers for each college major. The dozens of my college friends that were in the same degree fields as I were getting no offers at all when they were trying to find work with double digit unemployment, almost none of a graduating class got an offer. I was out of a job for over a year and a half and when I did get a job, no vacation, no sick leave, no holidays, just a pay check, but it was a paycheck. Now? I am not complaining, I had some very bad luck, some very good luck, and am enjoying retirement in a condo that has no mortgage.

Recent college grads now are starting to have some difficulty compared to years earlier. Recent college grads now find that their unemployment rate is higher than the general population unemployment rate. That is a new trend that suggests that the college degree is less valuable than it used to be. But when new college graduates have an unemployment rate of about five percent, that does make me jealous of when almost none of my graduating class were working in the early 1980s.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/...e:unemployment