A demographics anomaly in the works

Right now in the United States, there are more 23-year-olds than people of any other age. This seemingly trivial fact of demographics is an anomaly more than 50 years in the making. According to U.S. Census data, since 1947, the most represented age in the United States has always been a member of the group born in the 20 years after World War II, the baby boomers. In 1950, it was age 3. In 1990, it was 29. In 2010, it was 50.

The rise of the boomers, a group forged into adulthood during the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s, has been chronicled and teased apart since their conceptions. Boomers collectively were named Time’s Man of the Year in 1966. They were the first generation to have television, and, in many ways, the first to be marketed to as a distinct cohort, a collection of citizens with a cultural identity notably different from their parents. They have the highest voter participation rate of any group of Americans and currently hold the most powerful positions in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

But, as the Bob Dylan song goes, “The times, they are a-changin’.”

Today, a member of the most represented age in the United States is tech-savvy, entrepreneurial and less bound by the very term “generation” than ever before. This person will begin shaping the future of our nation from now on.

Millennials by the numbers

“I’ve graduated from college. I got my associate’s and now I’m in debt because of it. And that’s it,” says Lexi Williams. She turned 23 in late July. She works in the health insurance industry and is frustrated by her $400 a month loan payment, but knows things could be worse.

“I work with a girl who has $50,000 in student loans. She has a history degree. She sells health insurance. Yeah.”

By the numbers, Williams is nowhere near alone. In most discussions, 23-year-olds like her are lumped into the debt-riddled, amorphous, often critiqued, little understood demographic cohort we call Generation Y or “millennials.” Although definitions vary, the term is commonly understood to mean the roughly 77 million people born between 1980 and the early 2000s. Twenty-three-year-olds, in particular, stand in the midst of what marketing agency Sparks & Honey call a “demographic tsunami,” the wake of which will undoubtedly change facets of American life from entertainment to health care and everything in between.

Not that it hasn’t already. Thanks to ample new technology that this group is most adept at using, the traditional barriers of entry to many lucrative industries have crumbled, and millennials have begun to rise to the top of fields where boomers formerly reigned. There are more CEOs under 40 than ever thanks to the proliferation of startups. Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer is 39. Burger King’s CEO Daniel Schwartz is 34. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg celebrated his 30th birthday in May and as of July sits on a personal wealth of more than $33 billion.

In entertainment, the impact that tech-savvy millennials have had is even more striking. MySpace and YouTube essentially created the careers of artists such as Justin Bieber, Chief Keef, Iggy Azalea, Lana Del Rey and Pittsburgh’s Mac Miller and Wiz Khalifa. Today, applications such as Vine and Instagram have created their own world of comedians, actors and models who command hundreds of thousands of viewers and thus hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars.

Changes in attitudes

But it is not just technology that can be credited for the millennials’ meteoric rise. There is something distinct about their attitudes as well. According to the Pew Research Center, millennials are nothing if not confident and optimistic. Ninety percent of them believe they will reach their lifetime financial goals. In November 2008, in the midst of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, not one millennial reported in a Pepsi Refresh Report that they lacked hope about the long-term future. In 2010, the Harvard Institute of Politics reported that nearly half of all millennials thought they would be better off than their parents are. Overall, millennials seem to believe in themselves and their abilities more than any other group before them.

Although there is little that has crystallized the millennial identity like the former World Wars or the civil rights movement that shaped earlier generations, all agree about the importance of technology to this group. Nearly 1 in 4 millennials say technology is what makes their generation unique, more than double the percentage of Generation Xers (those born between the early 1960s to early 1980s) who say so, according to the Pew Research Center.

“I don’t need to watch the news. I have Facebook and Twitter,” says Klase Danko, 23, an aspiring actress. She works three part-time jobs and still lives in the same house she was born in, after graduating from Point Park University in 2013. “Technology has changed everything.”

James Snyder, a 23-year-old financial analyst who has been in the city six years, doesn’t have Facebook himself, but says social networking is “the most defining thing” for this generation.

“When you didn’t have social networks, you really didn’t have this direct visibility into one another’s lives. … Now you have this platform where you have instant access and visibility into anyone’s lives at literally the touch of a fingertip. And I don’t know if it makes everyone more connected, but it gives you access that didn’t really exist before.”

Allison Martini, a 23-year-old cashier, agrees. “It makes it easier, in some respects, but definitely harder to have a real conversation.”

The Web was a fact of life from birth for most of this group, unlike its slow infiltration into the lives of Generation Xers and the way television gradually became part of boomers’ leisure time. By the time millennials hit their teenage years, they had been through AOL chat rooms, Myspace and more. In that way, technology defines them only as a continuation of a trend started with the creation of the Web, not the start of something new.

All in all, the tendency to hold a mirror up to the boomers has perhaps led society to paint the millennials with much too broad a brush, relying on a cultural oversimplification about 30 years wide.

Researchers for the Millennial Segmentation Study at Carnegie Mellon University have delved into their project with just that thought in mind. Surveying 2,000 people ages 18-34, the study aims to focus on “sub-segments of the demographic that are becoming increasingly evident.”

Peter Boatwright, professor of marketing and co-founder and co-director of the Integrated Innovation Institute, says the study is looking directly at what distinguishes millennials from each other, instead of constantly comparing the entire group to boomers and Generation X.

“Eighteen to 34 is a huge segment of the population. You can’t lump them all together,” Boatwright says.

Technology as a defining factor has its limits. According to the study’s preliminary findings, when it comes to those ages 18-22 in comparison to ages 30-34, there are definite differences, but it’s not in “how digital they are.” Boatwright highlights what he calls “stage-of-life issues” as well that complicate any attempt to define this generation. Simply put, people in their 20s have less time on their hands than most people in their 50s and 60s. Things like civic engagement and other factors where millennials seem lacking may be less of a function of their narcissism or laziness and more of a function of the other commitments that come along with being young.

“It’s hard to compare people in their 20s to people in their 60s. You’re going to find differences in actions vs. intent.”