Very glad to hear that you enjoyed the piece, and I loved reading your story and experiences. There is absolutely not enough support for students going through these degrees -- the systems that are in place to help students enter the post-college world and support themselves using their new skills is sorely lacking. What's more, as you illustrated, that's not a new issue! It strikes me that we fundamentally don't understand how to educate people in ways that support them fully, and this has been a longstanding problem. Perhaps, in some ways, we're still mired in an ancient Greek Lyceum model of elitist education.
The people who do well in grad and post-grad degrees? More often than not they're ones who have some measure of financial support backing them -- and those who struggle through, especially in the U.S., without such backing are left both deeply in debt to an antagonistic system, and frequently unskilled in methods of self-support that allow them to use some portion of the education they were presumably passionate about!
I hope we start seeing some changes coming, both on the grand social scale and on the level of individuals in privileged positions within the academic environment. We need social policy fixes, but if the administrators who have control over how programs function can take notice and use their power to make even slight changes, the overall ripple effect could be huge on its own (and huger still should student debt eventually be eradicated and the burden of paying that back be eased off student's minds).
Thanks for your comments! :)