When the geniuses who created Obamacare planned on it being funded on the backs of young Americans, they forgot one critical component.

Young people actually have to be making money to pay into the system.

Interestingly, the scale economic problems facing their generation has actually be noticed by the editorial board of the student newspaper at the notoriously progressive UC Berkeley.

In a depressing sign of the times, a survey released this week shows a record number of college-educated Americans self-identify as “lower-class.” This news, sadly, is hardly shocking. It’s just another unpleasant reminder of the challenges millenial UC Berkeley students face as we prepare to depart the Berkeley bubble for the real world.

The General Social Survey, which measures social change in America, reported that in 2012, a full 3 percent of Americans with college degrees identified as lower class, up from 1.7 percent in 2002. While at a glance these numbers seem low and the difference between them insignificant, never before in the history of the survey (which started in 1972) has such a large portion of college-educated Americans considered themselves lower class.

To borrow a phrase from UC Berkeley public policy professor Jane Mauldon, why the shift in “class identities?”

Simply put, more and more members of our generation are probably realizing that the middle-class promise, the idea that hard work and a college degree would lead to a stable career, is illusory. Last month, the unemployment rate for 18- to 29-year-olds, adjusted for those not in the labor force, was about 11 percent. In comparison, the national unemployment rate is 7.3 percent.

Even without counting the millions of graduates underemployed working jobs such as barista or sandwich artist, these figures are troubling on their own and explain some of the economic unease illustrated in the survey. These statistics, however, are only part of the picture.

UC Berkeley is an elite university with an aesthetic to match that status. When prospective students come to visit, they see the magnificent pillars of Sproul Hall and the beauty and scope of the Doe Library. They learn about the storied history of the Free Speech Movement as well as the top-tier academic research that happens on this campus. What they aren’t prepared for, though, is what happens when their time at Berkeley is over.

Students here know all too well the fear of becoming a second-semester senior with no post-graduation job lined up and a degree society tells them is worthless because it’s in the wrong major. Even previously “secure” concentrations in fields such as biology and economics are no longer so safe, seemingly independent of the high GPAs we work to achieve during our time here.

…Millennials are hurting right now, and because no one seems to care, many of us have decided to tune out for lack of a better option. Here’s to hoping someone thinks of one.