What Makes Up Millennials

There is a popular picture of young people today: bike helmets and seat belt, firmly strapped in place; a pampered and protected generation that has been overfed, oversexed, and overindulged. This is partly true, but it’s far from the whole story.

There are many varying definitions of exactly where Generation X ends and Generation Y—or the Millennial Generation—begins. But for the purposes of this paper, Millennials are defined as people born between 1978 and 1993, or individuals who are currently 15 to 29 years old. Viewed through a statistician’s lens, Millennials are a big and diverse group of people. They are the largest living generation, outnumbering living Baby Boomers 77.6 million to 74.1 million.

They are very comfortable thinking of themselves as part of a global social and economic system, though they often feel powerless to participate in or affect national and international events.

They are also the most racially diverse generation in American history. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) at the University of Maryland, “between 1968 and 2006, the percentage of young residents who are white has fallen from 88 percent in 1968 to 62 percent in 2006. During the same period, the percentage of young people who are African American or Hispanic has grown by 2.3 and 10.6 percentage points respectively.”

The worldview of Millennials is often complicated and even contradictory. They are the first generation born into social media—connective, digital tools like email and mobile phones that are accessible and easy to use. However, they are also often disconnected from their physical communities because their parents are more likely to have moved around the country than their grandparents. They are very comfortable thinking of themselves as part of a global social and economic system, though they often feel powerless to participate in or affect national and international events.

The internal conflicts of young people extend to how they live their own lives. They are barraged daily by thousands of advertising messages and believe that the news media “cannot be trusted to present the news fairly”; yet, they are large consumers of online news. They have witnessed frightening, cataclysmic events, such as the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999, and the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Yet they are idealistic and generally trusting of the good intentions of others. They are open to people of different backgrounds and races, yet attend schools that are largely segregated by income or are re-segregated by race, and therefore have very few real opportunities to experience those differences themselves.

Despite coming of age during an unprecedented era of economic prosperity, Millennials still exhibit signs of significant stress and distress in their lives. CIRCLE researchers Mark Hugo Lopez and Karlo Barrios Marcelo conducted a study on youth demographics in 2006 which found that young adults today are less likely to be married and more likely to be unemployed than previous generations. Whether one survives the struggle to gain admission to college, or is a part of the large number of young people who do not attend, almost all young people face the twin issues of crushing debt and the real possibility that they will never achieve the standard of living of their parents.

This overriding economic uncertainty and concern contributes to their sense of pragmatism; they literally cannot afford to be impractical. According to Adrian Talbot, the founder of Generation Engage, many college students live in a “bubble” of protection and isolation, while their working peers are directly and profoundly affected by issues like predatory lending and living wages.

When taken together, these characteristics illustrate a vibrant and diverse group of young people, united by a generational shift initiated by a new technological age.