There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

As the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s—Millennials—reached adulthood, they suddenly found their much-anticipated employment opportunities dramatically constrained. This was the case even for those with a college degree (about 47 percent of the cohort). Suddenly the entire premise of the new educational paradigm collapsed: students who had taken out loans to support their educations could no longer afford to pay them off and sank into debt. Rather than a springboard to opportunity, advanced education suddenly seemed like a millstone around this generation’s neck. Given their relatively high level of educational achievement, it is a testament to the toughness of the times that Millennials have been deemed the “unluckiest generation” in American history. In the early 2000s, which was supposedly “their era,” Millennials were hit by economic setbacks from which they never recovered. These included the Great Recession, which struck just as they were either entering or trying to establish themselves in the job market. Ten years after that crisis, Millennials had still not recovered. They generally had fewer savings and assets than previous generations. Most of those who identified themselves in this group in social surveys told pollsters in 2018 that they would be unable to cover $1,000 in emergency expenses. In interviews that I conducted for this book, Millennials described feeling economically and politically insecure and were acutely aware of their inequality. My niece...