The on-ramp to adulthood is delayed and harder to reach today, a reality that is changing the country's society and economy, according to a new report.
More demanding job requirements, coupled with the pressures of the recession, have delayed the transition to adulthood in the past decade, according to the report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, published Monday.
James Roy, 26 years old, has spent the past six years paying off $14,000 in student loans for two years of college by skating from job to job. Now working as a supervisor for a coffee shop in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, Ill., Mr. Roy describes his outlook as "kind of grim."
"It seems to me that if you went to college and took on student debt,…show more content… Through analyzing census data from 1980 to 2012, the study found that on average, young workers are now 30 years old when they first earn a median-wage income of about $42,000, up from 26 years old in 1980.
About a third of adults in their early 20s work full time, a proportion that rises to about half of adults in their late 20s. The labor-force participation rate for young people last year declined to its lowest point in about 40 years, according to the report.
The decline in employment among young people mirrors a broader drop. The share of U.S. adults who work peaked at nearly 65% in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and has trended downward since. An aging population explains part of the fall, but even workers in the prime of their professional lives are less likely to work today than a decade ago.
In recent decades, the U.S. has seen a gradual shift in people's professional lives: Americans today tend to start work later and continue working longer than in past generations. A decade ago, a boy in his late teens was twice as likely as a man his grandfather's age to hold a job; today, the teen is actually less likely to…show more content… "The combination of structural change plus this particular recession has been devastating for millennials," said Anthony Carnevale, director of the center and co-author of the report. Mr. Carnevale estimates, by modeling previous recessions, that today's young people will lose a minimum of 3% in earnings over their lifetimes.
Between 2000 and 2012, the employment rate for people ages 21 to 25 dropped from 84% to 72% overall, with some demographics taking a bigger hit. Young men experienced a steeper decline, from 80% to 65%. The job rate for young workers without postsecondary education dwindled from 66% to 53%, and young African-Americans' peak unemployment rate after the recession reached 30%, double that of young whites.
"The millennial generation was the generation to confront this structural change first," said Mr. Carnevale. "It has sorted them out in ways that have made them more unequal than any generation
