Over the past 50 years – from the Silent Generation’s young adulthood to that of Millennials today – the US has undergone large cultural and societal shifts. But now that the youngest Millennials are adults, we can take a look at how they compare with those who were their age in the generations that came before.
Millennials, for example, are much better educated than their grandparents, as the share of young adults with a bachelor's degree or higher has steadily climbed since 1968. Around four-in-ten (39%) of those ages 25 to 37 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with just 15% of the Silent Generation, roughly a quarter of Baby Boomers and about three-in-ten Gen Xers (29%) when they were the same age.
Boomer women surged into the workforce as young adults, setting the stage for more Gen X and Millennial females to follow suit.
In 1966, when Silent Generation women were ages 22 through 37, a majority (58%) were not participating in the labor force (about 40% were employed).
For Millennial women today, 72% have a job while just a quarter are not in the labor force. Boomer women were the turning point. As early as 1985, more young Boomer women were employed (66%) than were not in the labor force (28%).
Despite a reputation for job hopping, Millennial workers are just as likely to stick with their employers as Gen Xers were when they were the same age.
Roughly seven-in-ten of each group ages 22 to 37 in 2018 (70%) reported working for their current employer for at least 13 months. (About three-in-ten of both groups said they’d been with their employer for at least five years.)
However, it's worth mentioning that the economy varied for each generation. While the Great Recession affected Americans broadly, it created a particularly challenging environment for Millennials entering the job market. The unemployment rate was especially high for America’s youngest adults in the years just after the recession, a reality that would impact Millennials' future earnings and wealth.
The financial well-being of Millennials is complicated. While the individual earnings for young workers have remained mostly flat over the past 50 years, there's a notably large gap between what Millennials who have a college education make and the ones without it.
Millennials with a bachelor's degree or more and a full-time job had median annual earnings valued at $56,000 in 2018, roughly equal to those of college-educated Generation X workers in 2001.
But Millennials with some college or less had annual earnings lower than their counterparts in prior generations.
While young adults, in general, do not have much accumulated wealth, Millennials possess slightly less than Boomers did at the same age.
The median net worth of households headed by Millennials (ages 20 to 35 in 2016) was about $12,500 in 2016, compared with $20,700 for households headed by Boomers of the same age in 1983.
And the median net worth of Gen X households at the same age was about $15,100.
