One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That\u2019s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support. The common explanation for the shift is that people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s came of age amid several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends. Those who graduated college as the housing market and financial system were imploding faced the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history. Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds, for instance, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000. (Kasinecz still has about $60,000 to go.) And more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning they make substandard wages in jobs that don\u2019t require a college degree. According to Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at Yale University, the negative impact of graduating into a recession never fully disappears. Even 20 years later, the people who graduated into the recession of the early \u201980s were making substantially less money than people lucky enough to have graduated a few years afterward, when the economy was booming.<\/p>\n
Some may hope that the boomerang generation represents an unfortunate but temporary blip \u201d\u201d that the class of 2015 will be able to land great jobs out of college, and that they\u2019ll reach financial independence soon after reaching the drinking age. But the latest recession was only part of the boomerang generation\u2019s problem. In reality, it simply amplified a trend that had been growing stealthily for more than 30 years. Since 1980, the U.S. economy has been destabilized by a series of systemic changes \u201d\u201d the growth of foreign trade, rapid advances in technology, changes to the tax code, among others \u201d\u201d that have affected all workers but particularly those just embarking on their careers. In 1968, for instance, a vast majority of 20-somethings were living independent lives; more than half were married. But over the past 30 years, the onset of sustainable economic independence has been steadily receding. By 2007, before the recession even began, fewer than one in four young adults were married, and 34 percent relied on their parents for rent.<\/p>\n
These boomerang kids are not a temporary phenomenon. They appear to be part of a new and permanent life stage.<\/p>\n