To be honest this rings pretty true. My wife studied anthropology and it was remarkable that _every single one_ of the people she knew working in the field were either desperate starving debt-ridden recent grads who hadn't given up yet, or people with rich partners or parents who could fund their hobby.
Hell, I ended up supporting her through her master's but we finally had a good "forcing us to stay in a high COL area so you can make $28,000 a year at a job with no security is not helping the family" chat.
Well she's sharp enough to realize it, it was fine to be honest. One of the problems is that full-time museum jobs tend to be in the middle of expensive cities.
It wasn't me just saying "you need to quit", it was "we have things we want to do with our lives and we can't do them if we're both working just to pay for housing in the middle of an expensive city". We knew we wanted kids ands definitely did _not_ want the kind of mortgage where it dictates what you can do with your life, and when you look at the cost of childcare, or imagine yourself saying "we'll I'd like to have a stab at starting my own business but with a $5000 a month mortgage payment it's just not practical", you realize that if you're not careful it's really easy to build a life for yourself where you _have_ to make tons of money.
I do all right, but I'm not in the extremely high income brackets a lot of people on this site seem to be in. So I got a remote job, we moved to the country, and we had a couple kids. The house is paid off (no rent, no mortgage - we emigrated too, which helped). There are definitely downsides but avoiding the housing debt trap has had a lot of upsides.
Hell, I ended up supporting her through her master's but we finally had a good "forcing us to stay in a high COL area so you can make $28,000 a year at a job with no security is not helping the family" chat.
She doesn't work in the field anymore.