Are Millennials Generation Crunch? Needed: Priorities Review To Match Spending Review!

Mal Fletcher

Posted on: Tuesday 2 November 2010

The Millennials have landed!

In a recent Social comment editorial on this site, I wrote about the shift of leadership now taking place from Boomers to GenX.

I wrote that: ‘The future we build from here will depend on how willing we all are to understand generational differences and to turn any tensions between us into creative ones.’

This will prove to be even truer as, over the next decade, we watch the Millennials rising and finding their generational voice.

They’re taking up junior positions in every sector of industry and, where space is made for their unique generational characteristics, they potentially bring great skills to the table.

Whilst their influence in most sectors is still to fully bloom, no one can doubt that they already reign supreme in social media, gaming and other areas of digital media.

These are the areas that are changing the way we communicate, interact with government and do business - and will continue to do so in ways we can’t yet imagine.

As Millennials arise, the biggest potential flashpoint between Millennials and their Boomer and GenX forebears will be a financial one.

It will take two forms and how we deal with these will determine whether we manage the future well and see our societies flourish.

The first form has to do with the cost of getting an education.

In the case of nations like the UK, Australia and the US, many are carrying exorbitant student loan debts.

Of the students currently applying for tertiary places in the UK, most will accrue total loan debts of between £25,000 and £35,000. Students in some of Britain’s top universities will see their student loan debt climb to as much as £40,000 ($64,000 USD).

For some of my American friends these amounts will seem quite reasonable. In Europe, though, education has been publicly funded for more than a generation – it still is throughout much of the EU.

The Millennials are not crying for revolution in the streets as their Boomer parents might have done. Yet many of today’s students feel frustrated by the inequity in the way they’re being treated compared to their parents’ generation.

Meanwhile, in Australia, where student loans are also a relatively new phenomenon, one individual has racked up a personal student debt of $377,000 Australian dollars.

In any currency, that’s an awful lot of money for a student to repay once he or she emerges from school – into a job market that’s decidedly unpredictable, at best.

The other way the financial tension will express itself is what I call ‘pension pain’. In the UK, there are now more people aged over 65 than under 16.  By 2017 there will be 50% more people over 65 than there are today.

From 2020 the ratio of working age people to pensioners will be 2:1 (today, it’s 4:1). In the US, 55 million boomers in their 60s are already the nation’s largest healthcare group.

The burden on wage earners will double if we’re to keep pensions at their present rate. Who will bear the burden of paying for this? Mainly the Millennials.

Little wonder that one astute Millennial journalist, writing in The Times this week, has dubbed her generation, ‘Generation Crunch’.

In her piece, Julia Margo rightly notes that her generation will face a social crisis as well as an economic one. ‘Where will these oldies live when they are too ill to live alone? Who will look after them? We will… We will struggle to balance careers with caring.’

My work with and research of Millennials suggests that neither the money nor the care issues are the areas of biggest concern for this generation.

What bothers them most is that these constrictions may prevent them from writing a very different kind of generation story.

They’re a much more civic-minded generation than either Boomers or GenXers were at the same age. They believe strongly that their generation can change the world for the better, by marrying together the blue-skies idealism of the Boomers with the grass-roots pragmatism of Generation X.

We who are members of the latter generations need to do some serious thinking about all this.

In the aftermath of the global credit crunch, we need not just a spending review, but a review of our priorities.

We need to leave Millennials much more than pension pain and education debts. They need the space to shine. They’ll have enough problems to deal with – every generation does – without inheriting all of ours.


Q: Do you think enough is being done to help Millennials reach their potential? If not, what would you like to see change? Would love your comments below...