For a Lot of Millennial Men, the American Dream Is Dead

Depending on what you read, millennials are either lazy and entitled moochers who can’t move out of their parents’ basements, or they’re victims of the most severe and protracted economic slowdown since the Great Depression.

A comprehensive new report from Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality suggests it’s the latter narrative we should be paying attention to. The report reviewed the state of the millennials, covering topics as varied as student debt, employment, income, and social mobility. In general, it presented a mixed outlook: While some millennials — in particular, those with college degrees — are doing okay, for others — namely those without an advanced education — it seems the American dream has become a distant memory.

Certainly, millennials can lay quite a bit of blame on the recession. Researchers have found that generations who enter the labor force during recessions often pay a long-term price for that timing. Labor market disadvantages tend to build on each other — that disappointing first job, taken perhaps in desperation in the depths of a recession, makes it harder to get a great second job, and so on and so on. “Anytime anything goes bad in the economy and in the labor market, it hits young people the most because they’re the most marginal workers in the labor market,” says Harry Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University who worked on the report. “And there are a lot of things in the labor market that haven’t been great.”

Especially so for men. In one chapter of the report on income and earnings, sociologist Christine Percheski finds that millennial men in their twenties and thirties had lower median income than previous generations. What’s more, wage inequality is higher for male millennials than for any previous generation in young adulthood. But the narrative is flipped for millennial women, who are enjoying higher incomes and lower levels of inequality in comparison to Gen X and Baby Boomer women.

Percheski says this is not surprising — given just how poorly women in previous cohorts fared at work. “Millennial women are working at higher rates than baby boomers, and their wages have gone up,” she says. “A lot of this has to do with how very unequal women were before.”

The declines in male income can be largely explained by the fact that millennial men are simply less likely to be working than previous generations. (Percheski finds that median earnings for employed millennials were slightly higher than Gen Xers, and on par with baby boomers.) In another chapter in the report, Holzer, the Georgetown professor, finds that between 1996 and 2016, labor force participation for men aged 25 to 34 declined by 4.4%. (Millennial women saw declines as well, but they were much smaller.)

    “You’re not seeing an improvement of the sort that Americans have long expected.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, less-educated millennials have been particularly hard hit. Over 90% of millennial men with college degrees worked in 2016, versus 70% of high school dropouts. The gap among female millennials is even bigger: Eighty-three percent of female, millennial college graduates participated in the labor force in 2016, versus only 50% of high school dropouts. The divergence doesn’t stop at labor force participation — researchers also found that millennials with a high school degree or less are earning less than similarly educated workers in previous generations. In other words, for those without college degrees, economic security is much harder to attain today than in previous generations. “It’s really the non-college millennials whose participation is down,” Holzer says.

A common trope about millennials is that they’re just doing everything — finishing college, moving out of their parents’ house, getting married, having children — a little later than previous generations. And many of the researchers who contributed to the report suspect that millennials might yet “catch up,” at least partially, on some outcomes. But David Grusky, the director of Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, finds the overall data less than encouraging.

“You’re not seeing an improvement of the sort that Americans have long expected,” he says. “Overall, it would be hard to look at these results and be pleased.”