Millennials may be America’s most educated generation, but you wouldn’t know it from where they stand economically. As a group, they lag significantly behind previous generations on a host of economic issues.
Fewer are buying homes, more are living with parents and economic recovery seems to pass them by, according to The Hill.
A Congressional report released Tuesday found that millennials are not feeling the impacts of the economic recovery.
The Joint Economic Committee’s report added to what’s become a long list of economic data showing that millennials are delaying major life decisions such as buying a home and getting married.
Almost 40 percent of Americans age 25 to 34 were heads of a household ten years ago. That rate now stands at 37.2 percent. Additionally, the percentage of millennials living with their parents has jumped from three to 14 percent, while their incomes have fallen nearly 10 percent.
While the national unemployment rate remains at 5.8 percent, millennial unemployment is at nearly 17 percent — five percentage points higher than the pre-recession 12 percent jobless rate for the young.
The report found that American millennials are also more educated than any other previous generation. Sixty-three percent of them have at least some college education. That’s an 11-percentage-point increase from the 52 percent of Americans in that same age bracket who had some level of college education in 1994.Such bleak economic conditions can have long-lasting impacts.
According to the report: “Even if young people land new, better-paying jobs at some point, lower earnings earlier in their careers may result in permanently lower retirement savings and net worth than might have been the case if economic conditions had been better when they first entered the labor force.”