The Pew Research Center, a little over a month ago, released a report entitled "Millennial Life: How Young Adulthood Today Compares with Prior Generations" (LINK). The report defines Millennials as those born from 1981-1996, making them 22-37 at the time of the analyses (2018). The researchers then compared Millennials to members of three prior generations (X, Baby Boom, and Silent) when members of those generations were likewise 22-37.*
Millennials are more educated and less likely to be married than their earlier-generation counterparts. The report also looks at employment, earnings, living with one's parents, and voting. One of the more interesting graphs, in my view, shows that whereas marriage rates within each pre-Millennial generation did not vary much by education (e.g., in the Silent Generation, subgroups with different educational attainment all fell within 81-86% being married), there were wide educational differences in marriage among the Millennials. Fifty-three percent of Millenials with a Bachelor's degree or higher were married, compared to 44% of those with some college and 40% of high school graduates.
This report is a must-read for those interested in the demographic characteristics of today's young adults.
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*Some of the analyses compared 25-37 year-olds, presumably as a result of different data sets having responses from different age groups available.
