I disagree. I think it would be interesting to do that same article, but replace the MIT tuition with that of a decent in state school, and replace the housing prices with those of a medium/large midwest city like Omaha, Cleveland, or Pittsburg.
Salaries don't scale like rent does. In Cleveland, you can get a 1 bedroom for around 900 dollars, in SF, that's 3.5k+. That means to maintain the same purchasing power and keeping monthly rent at 1/40th of salary, you'd need to earn 36k in CLE, but 140k in SF. 140k isn't out of reach in the Bay Area at all, but usually requires a college degree, while 36k in CLE is in reach of those without a college degree, and numbers twice that high are in reach of those with a STEM degree.
This means you're going to have more disposable income, not having to deal with 5%+ rent increases every year, pay less in the higher tax brackets, and be able to buy a house without paying nearly as much interest. All just because you stop trying to be the top 1% and live in some place that isn't NYC or SF, but is still in the top 50 largest cities in the US.
It's possible that if you did that you might be okay _today_, if your kids are also gonna go to a "decent" school instead of a better school, if you're also gonna get a "decent" house, et cetera, and you happen to live in the right place to enable all of this. The trend lines are strongly suggesting that everywhere is going down similar paths, though. There's no indication there's anywhere specific they're going to -stop-.
The problem here is the trends, not today, because those big expenses are in the future and we need to worry about what they'll be then, not what they are today. The trends are happening just about everywhere, just to different degrees.
Yes, with the wealth (and power) gap increasing, if you want your descendants to have a chance to move up class-wise, you have to try and be in school districts where they will make friends who are high achieving (usually from high achieving parents), so then they can get into high achieving colleges where they can create a network of high achieving people to rely on in their future careers and lives, and maybe even marry one of those. It all compounds, and the faster it compounds, the faster the gap widens and the harder it is to catch up. Until something causes the reset button (revolution) to be hit.
But that's the thing, by definition, you can't always move up, and in a lot of cases, it's harmful trying to move up when you're really not ready to spend the effort it takes to give there.
It's statistically unlikely that you and your offspring going to perform at world leading levels of being in the 1%. It's the equivalent of buying the best carpentry tools in the industry and then complaining that they're too expensive for your hobby use. If you're going to pay for Harvard/MIT, you're going to get a lot out of them, but the ROI for going to a such expensive school and living in a highly competitive area only works if you can take full advantage by really maximizing connections and getting high grades. If you can't, which is ok, you're just wasting time and money where spending 60% to go to a decent state school and living in a place that isn't next to FAANG office is going to get you 95% of the return in purchasing power.
Sooner people realize you don't have to be the best, richest, smartest, etc to be happy is when people will stop mortgaging their future to try to achieve something they don't actually want.
Salaries don't scale like rent does. In Cleveland, you can get a 1 bedroom for around 900 dollars, in SF, that's 3.5k+. That means to maintain the same purchasing power and keeping monthly rent at 1/40th of salary, you'd need to earn 36k in CLE, but 140k in SF. 140k isn't out of reach in the Bay Area at all, but usually requires a college degree, while 36k in CLE is in reach of those without a college degree, and numbers twice that high are in reach of those with a STEM degree.
This means you're going to have more disposable income, not having to deal with 5%+ rent increases every year, pay less in the higher tax brackets, and be able to buy a house without paying nearly as much interest. All just because you stop trying to be the top 1% and live in some place that isn't NYC or SF, but is still in the top 50 largest cities in the US.