“It’s clear that the exact cohort that they were tracking has gone through a fairly tumultuous young adulthood,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
While job prospects have certainly improved for the younger brothers and sisters of this cohort, Huelsman said he worries that their challenging experience has created a new standard of what young adulthood should look like that’s far below that of previous generations. “Because this generation had to borrow in such high amounts or pay so much for college and had relatively anemic earnings, we just sort of assume that that is the norm,” he said. “We’ve baked in the fact that people are going to struggle and they’re going to start their economic lives late.” [...]