As a college professor, it’s easy for me to forget that not all Millennials are college students or graduates. I called attention to a recent Mintel Market Research report that notes college students are just 15% of the 71 million young adults 18-34 in the U.S. The report says ‘Affluent Young Adults’ make up another 19%. The remaining two thirds are what Mintel calls ‘Minimalists’ or ‘Unpowered Young Adults’. These groups are quite different in their demographics, buying habits and general outlook on life. The large number of ‘Minimalists’, and their aggregate buying power, make them critically important for marketers to understand.
A new report from Tufts University (“Youth Demographics – Youth with No College
Experience“) provides an even more detailed picture of the education divide among Millennials. The report focuses on young adults 18-29 years old. Like Mintel, the report reminds us that non-college educated young adults represent a sizeable opportunity for marketers. The rate of college education among 18-29 year olds has increased steadily since the 1960’s, yet today only 52% of all young adults have at least some post-high school education.
The Tufts report rebuts one of the the most widely shared views of this generation, it’s civic-mindedness. According to the report, this trait is a function of education. Those who have no college experience are significantly less engaged on 10 different dimensions, from voting, to volunteering to membership in clubs or unions than their college educated counterparts.
In the Presidential primaries and caucuses, young people who had college experience were 18 percentage points more likely to vote than their counterparts with no college experience (25% and 7%, respectively). In the general election 70% of young people who voted had at least some college experience. Comparing non-college youth to full-time college students and people with bachelor’s degrees would produce substantially bigger gaps.
The education divide is apparent in other ways as well. Non-college young adults are more likely to be unemployed. Census data shows the unemployment rate for 18-29s with no college experience was 13.6%, while only 4.5% for those with some college. Interestingly, they are equally likely to be married.
What makes all this especially interesting is that another Tufts report (“Civic Engagement and the Changing Transition to Adulthood”) says it wasn’t always this way. In fact, they believe that there is a generational shift that is increasing the divide between those with and without college educations. This report argues that “life has changed dramatically for people in their 20s. Marriage, childbearing, financial independence, and other aspects of the “transition to adulthood” have been transformed since the 1970s, and are now very different for people with and without college educations.”
Most disturbingly, they conclude that young adults without college experience are permanently missing some aspects of civic engagement–such as group membership–that were common thirty years ago. While this has obvious implications for society and policy, it also is important context for marketers. We must keep in mind that there is great diversity among 71 million people, and generational shifts we see among the college educated, like civic-mindedness, may not hold for everyone.
