- Millennials benefited from the expansion of health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The share of adults in their 20s without health insurance fell by more than half from 2009 to 2017.
- This expansion led to a reduction in racial and ethnic inequalities in health insurance coverage.
- Millennials spend at least as much time with relatives or friends, and hanging out at bars, as preceding generations.
- This commitment to relatively high rates of face-to-face interaction continues even as millennials use social media at unprecedented rates.
- The millennial generation—unlike previous ones—has all but closed the digital divide between poor and nonpoor.
- Young millennials have lower rates of homeownership than Generation X, baby boomers, and the Silent Generation at comparable ages. We have to reach back to a generation born nearly a century ago—the Greatest Generation—to find homeownership rates lower than those found today among millennials.
- The racial gap in young-adult homeownership is larger for millennials than for any generation in the past century. Although the housing reforms after the civil rights era reduced the racial homeownership gap, all those gains have now been lost.
- Although there is much worry about millennials’ well-being, their poverty rates at age 30 are no higher than those of Gen Xers at the same age.
- But millennials do have very high poverty rates before the safety net takes effect by supplementing market income. Robust tax credit and transfer programs have staved off what would otherwise be an increase in poverty relative to prior generations.
- The gender segregation of occupations is less pronounced among millennials than among any other generation in recent U.S. history.
- By contrast, millennials are experiencing just as much racial and ethnic occupational segregation as prior generations, even though millennials are less tolerant of overt expressions of racism.
- American men and women born since 1980—the millennials—have been less upwardly mobile than previous generations of Americans.
- The growth of white-collar and professional employment resulted in relatively high occupational status for the parents of millennials. Because that transition raised parents’ status, it set a higher target for millennials to hit.
- This target is not frequently hit, in part because the economy is not providing enough opportunities for millennials in the white-collar and professional sectors.
- For men, the conventional “gloomy millennial stories” have some merit, as the median income of millennials is lower than that of Gen X, and the median earnings of millennials are not any higher than those of Gen X.
- For women, the American Dream lives on in the sense that there’s a steady generational improvement in median earnings and income, an improvement that is carrying on into the millennial generation.
- Relative to Generation X, millennials took out more student loans, took out larger student loans, and defaulted more frequently.
- Defaults increased because millennials faced higher tuition payments, took out larger loans to meet those higher costs, turned to for-profit schools that don’t offer any returns, and entered a labor market in the throes of recession.
- Millennials are more likely than previous generations to identify as multiracial.
- Millennials also are more likely to adopt unconventional gender identities, such as reporting that they see themselves as equally feminine and masculine.
- However, they are not outpacing previous generations in rejecting race and gender stereotypes. Their attitudes toward women’s roles and perceptions of black Americans are quite similar to those of baby boomers or Gen Xers.
- Labor force activity has declined for all prime-age workers, but the decline among young workers has been especially rapid. This means that millennials who are currently 25–34 years old are working less than Gen Xers at the same age.
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