Millennials Weighed Down By Student Loan Debt.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Millennials Weighed Down By Student Loan Debt.

U.S. Census Bureau data shows that the number of 25- to 34-year-olds living in their parents’ homes jumped 17.5% from 2007-2010. This is similar to Pew Research, which found that 57% of 18- to 24-year-olds lived with their parents in 2012. By way of comparison, in 1960, three out of four women and two out of three men had finished school, left home, were financially independent, had married and had children by age 30.
Meanwhile, the number of 30-year-olds who own their own homes is now roughly equal to those who live with their parents–a sharp contrast to 2003, when a 30-year-old American was twice as likely to own a home as he or she was to live with parents, according to the New York Federal Reserve (24). There’s also a clear correlation between growth in student debt and the rate at which adult offspring live with their parents. For every $10,000 increase in a state’s student debt per graduate, there’s a corresponding 2.9 percentage-point rise in 25-year-olds living with parents (25).
All of this comes as the dollar amount of student loans outstanding in the U.S. has tripled in the past decade, reaching a record $1.2 trillion last year. (See “Growing U.S. Student Debt Could Have Long-Term Credit Implications,” published Aug. 26, 2014.) In fact, student debt was the only type of household borrowing that continued to grow during the recent recession and recovery.

Ouch.