Millennials Entering Adulthood

The Millennial generation is carving out a unique journey into adulthood. Ranging in age from 18 to 33, they tend to be less connected to organized politics and religion, closely tied through social media, burdened by debt, wary of others, not in a hurry to marry, yet hopeful about the future.

They are also America’s most racially diverse generation. In these ways, they differ from today’s older generations and from older adults when they were the age Millennials are now.

Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that half of Millennials (50%) identify as political independents, and about three-in-ten (29%) are not affiliated with any religion. These levels of political and religious disaffiliation are among the highest recorded for any generation in the past 25 years of Pew polling.

Despite this, Millennials tend to vote heavily Democratic and hold liberal views on many political and social issues, from supporting an active government to backing same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. (For more on these views, see Chapters 1 and 2.)

These findings are based on a new Pew Research Center survey conducted from Feb. 14-23, 2014, among 1,821 adults nationwide, including 617 Millennial adults, and analysis of other Pew Research Center surveys conducted between 1990 and 2014.

Millennials are also distancing themselves from another core institution of society—marriage. Only 26% of this generation is married. At the same age, 36% of Generation X, 48% of Baby Boomers, and 65% of the Silent Generation were married. (See box on page 10 for demographic portraits of America’s four adult generations). Most unmarried Millennials (69%) express a desire to marry, but many, especially those with lower income and education levels, feel they need a solid economic foundation first.

Digital Natives

Adults of all ages have become less connected to political and religious institutions in the past decade, but Millennials lead this trend. They are also at the forefront of using new digital platforms—the internet, mobile technology, social media—to create personalized networks of friends, colleagues, and groups with shared interests.

Millennials are “digital natives”—the only generation that didn’t have to adapt to these technologies. It’s no surprise they are the most avid users. For example, 81% of Millennials are on Facebook, where their generation’s median friend count is 250, much higher than that of older age groups (though these digital generation gaps have narrowed somewhat in recent years).

Millennials are also distinctive in placing themselves at the center of self-created digital networks. Fully 55% have posted a “selfie” on a social media site; no other generation does this nearly as much. Indeed, in the new Pew Research survey, only about six-in-ten Boomers and about a third of Silents say they know what a “selfie” is—though the term was named the Oxford Dictionaries’ “word of the year” in 2013.

However, despite their enthusiastic embrace of digital life, nine-in-ten Millennials say people generally share too much information about themselves online, a view shared by similar proportions of all older generations.

Racial Diversity

Millennials are the most racially diverse generation in American history, driven by a large wave of Hispanic and Asian immigrants over the past 50 years, whose U.S.-born children are now becoming adults. In this sense, Millennials are a transitional generation. Some 43% of Millennial adults are non-white, the highest share of any generation. About half of newborns in America today are non-white, and the Census Bureau projects that the full U.S. population will be majority non-white around 2043.

The racial makeup of today’s young adults is a key factor in explaining their political liberalism. But it’s not the only factor. Across a range of political and ideological measures, white Millennials, while less liberal than non-whites of their generation, are more liberal than whites in older generations.

Low on Social Trust; Hopeful about the Nation’s Future

Millennials have entered adulthood with low levels of social trust. In response to a longstanding social science survey question, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” only 19% of Millennials say most people can be trusted, compared with 31% of Gen Xers, 37% of Silents, and 40% of Boomers.

Their racial diversity may partly explain Millennials’ low levels of social trust. A 2007 Pew Research Center analysis found that minorities and low-income adults had lower levels of social trust than other groups. Based on similar findings over many years from other surveys, sociologists have theorized that people who feel vulnerable or disadvantaged find it riskier to trust because they’re less equipped to deal with the consequences of misplaced trust.

Despite this distrust of people and detachment from traditional institutions, Millennials are not out of step with older adults when it comes to their views about big business and the role of government. They are about as likely as their elders to have a favorable view of business, and they are more likely than older generations to support an activist government.

They are also somewhat more hopeful than older adults about America’s future, with 49% of Millennials saying the country’s best years are ahead, a view held by 42% of Gen Xers, 44% of Boomers, and 39% of Silents.

The relative optimism of today’s young adults contrasts with the views of Boomers when they were about the same age as Millennials are now. In a 1974 Gallup survey, only about half of adults under 30 said they had “quite a lot” of confidence in America’s future, compared with seven-in-ten of those ages 30 and older.

Boomers came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s, helping lead the civil rights, women’s rights, anti-war, and counter-cultural movements of that era. In 1972, the first presidential election in which large numbers of Boomers were eligible to vote, they leaned much more Democratic than their elders. But attitudes formed in early adulthood don’t always stay fixed. In the latest Pew Research survey, about half of Boomers (53%) say their political views have grown more conservative as they’ve aged, while just 35% say they’ve grown more liberal.

Economic Hardships

Millennials are also the first in modern times to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty, and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than Gen Xers and Boomers had at the same stage of their life cycles.

Their difficult economic circumstances partly reflect the impact of the Great Recession (2007-2009) and partly the longer-term effects of globalization and rapid technological change on the American workforce. Median household income in the U.S. today remains below its 1999 peak, the longest stretch of stagnation in the modern era, and during that time, income and wealth gaps have widened.

The timing of these macro-economic trends has been especially hard on older Millennials, many of whom were just entering the workforce in 2007 when the economy sank into a deep recession from which it has yet to fully recover. 

Not surprisingly, the new Pew Research survey finds that about seven-in-ten Americans, spanning all generations, say that today’s young adults face more economic challenges than their elders did when they were starting out.

At the same time, a third of older Millennials (ages 26 to 33) have a four-year college degree or more—making them the best-educated group of young adults in American history. Educational attainment is highly correlated with economic success, even more so for this generation than previous ones. In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, young adults today who don’t advance beyond high school have been paying a much higher price—in terms of low wages and high unemployment—than their counterparts did one and two generations ago.

However, the new generation of college graduates also has their own economic burdens. They are entering adulthood with record levels of student debt: Two-thirds of recent bachelor’s degree recipients have outstanding student loans, with an average debt of about $27,000. Two decades ago, only half of recent graduates had college debt, and the average was $15,000.

The economic hardships of young adults may be one reason that many have been slow to marry. The median age at first marriage is now the highest in modern history—29 for men and 27 for women. Unlike past patterns, when adults in all socio-economic groups married at roughly the same rate, marriage today is more common among those with higher incomes and more education.

Perhaps because of their slow journey to marriage, Millennials lead all generations in the share of out-of-wedlock births. In 2012, 47% of births to women in the Millennial generation were non-marital, compared with 21% among older women. Some of this gap reflects a lifecycle effect—older women have always been less likely to give birth outside of marriage. But the gap is also driven by a shift in behaviors in recent decades. In 1996, when Gen Xers were about the same age that Millennials were in 2012, just 35% of births to that generation’s mothers were outside of marriage (compared with 15% among older women in 1996).

Millennials join their elders in disapproving of this trend. About six-in-ten adults in all four generations say that more children being raised by a single parent is bad for society; this is the most negative evaluation by the public of any of the changes in family structure tested in the Pew Research survey (see Chapter 3).

Economic Optimism; Social Security Worries

Despite their financial burdens, Millennials are the nation’s most stubborn economic optimists. More than eight-in-ten say they either currently have enough money to lead the lives they want (32%) or expect to in the future (

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