<![CDATA[The productive-age generation, particularly Millennials and Gen Alpha, leverages social media as a discursive space to shape and circulate discourse. Beyond acting as passive consumers, they serve as active information producers, including within the realm of educational issues. This study aims to analyze how college students’ educational discourse was framed on TikTok from 2025 to 2026. Data were drawn from nine TikTok accounts that actively address educational issues in Indonesia, with content selected randomly from the observed profiles. Employing a qualitative methodology grounded in Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework, data were collected using a selective note-taking technique across various posts related to education. The findings reveal that educational framing on TikTok portrays higher education as excessively costly, offering no guarantee for future success, and triggering regret among the younger generation. At the textual level, the discourse reflects an underlying ideology that fosters negative perceptions of education and constructs a generational identity characterized by a waning interest in pursuing university degrees. At the level of discursive practice, this framing is reinforced by real-world social conditions, including escalating tuition fees and academic stressors driven by family expectations, mental pressure, and final thesis completion. Furthermore, at the sociocultural level, the educational discourse intersects with broader social phenomena such as the emerging use of the lexeme “unalive” and the rise of quarter-life crisis anxieties highlighting the intricate connection between educational experiences and the broader social dynamics of today’s youth.]]>
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