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For a Lot of Millennial Men, the American Dream Is Dead
The economic prospects of those without college degrees, particularly men, are grim
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…
