What No One has Realized about Millennials: We are Adults

By Haley Aguirre

If you are reading this, thank you! Below I have provided a well-researched list of four qualities in millennials that no one seems to notice (hint: they are mostly good). This is not bragging about how great our generation is, that will come in a later post so be on the LOOKOUT; rather it is a serious discussion on legit life problems we deal with as young adults and the skills we utilize to get through it all.

First for the problems,

The struggle to establish ourselves is real, mostly because we are poor. Older millennials actually do have jobs and are starting families already, but the youngest of millennials (currently between age 18 and 22) are in the midst of college. That technically makes us grown ups, which means there is pressure to get our own life going. A simple expectation for our age, right? Wrong. Getting our own life implies embarking on a career, buying a house, starting a family, and building up our own assets. According to Student Loan Hero, “The average Class of 2016 graduate has $37,172 in student loan debt.” If we enter our first chance at independence with debt up to our elbows, then NO, establishing ourselves is not a simple task. It was never easy to begin with, but there is something different going on here. Catherine Rampell from the Washington Post dives into the issue a little deeper. She finds that homeownership among 35 year olds and younger is at 34.1%, “And for the first time since 1880, a greater share of this age group is bunking up with Mom and Dad,” instead of other living arrangements.

This is kind of a crazy situation...so what do we do? Take the qualities no one has noticed we have, and use them to our advantage.

Ironically, we have it good. Okay, maybe this one is already known, but the effects are not. First I will put it all out there blatantly. Millennials are privileged. They are most likely to grow up well nourished, educated, somewhat wealthy, and they can, “Enjoy freedoms that their predecessors could have barely imagined,” (The Economist). With the exception of poverty, most young adults today have experienced a good, comfortable life. That is why adulthood is so shocking, yet so great at the same time. We are privileged to have the resources that allow us to be successful. A great pedestal of advantage has formed under our feet, and I believe we can leap off this pedestal into the world of responsibility. Sounds better than the usual smack-talk about being lazy, right?

We are the most educated generation for our age. It makes sense. The norm for a typical millennial is to graduate high school, then go to college. The first eighteen years of life are basically training us for post-secondary education, and establishing eligibility for getting accepted into major universities. While research is beginning to show that college is not the best route for everyone, we cannot help the fact that a mass number of today’s young adult population already have at least a bachelor’s degree and will certainly use this knowledge in the field. Pew Research Center compares the education levels of four generations of young adults in this basic diagram:

We read! Yes, print books included. All that education is a result from hours upon hours and pages upon pages of reading. Somehow though, we find even more books to read for our leisure. Ok, maybe not everyone is a book worm, but on average millennials access print and digital reading material more often than older generations did at our age. Neil Howe even wrote a Forbes article titled, "Millennials: A Generation of Page Turners," and basically dismantled popular beliefs that said otherwise. To be clear, digital material includes eBooks and apps such as Hooked which put novels in the form of text messages. Test out this habit for yourself: How many of these books have you read? Was it for school or fun? Hmm. That should come in handy sometime in life.

So there you have it. The next phase for this entire generation is to start their own life, which looks like an impossible feat. But with our steady backgrounds, well-educated minds, history of reading, (and the good things that will be listed in an article to come) we are bound to turn out just fine. There is every reason to have faith in ourselves as we take on new responsibilities and learn to survive the “real world.”

It is funny, all this talk about millennials in comparison to older generations makes me wonder… what about the younger generations?

I’ll leave that up to you.