Young Americans Are Taking Longer to Settle Into Careers, Report Says

Young Americans, especially men, are taking longer to start their careers, according to a report released on Monday by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

From 1980 to 2012, researchers found, the age at which young workers reached the middle of the wage spectrum—an indicator of financial independence—increased to 30 from 26. A quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds take unpaid jobs just to gain work experience, and only one in 10 of 18- to 24-year-olds considers his or her current job a career. The rate of labor-force participation among young adults has declined to a level last seen in 1972.

The report, “Failure to Launch: Structural Shift and the New Lost Generation,” describes how those trends relate to the nation’s employment picture over all. College-educated Americans, for instance, work later into life. Although that trend has not caused the employment decline among young adults, the researchers found, a generational imbalance in public spending could compromise their future prospects.

“The lockstep march from school to work and then on to retirement,” the report says, “no longer applies for a growing share of Americans. ... As a result, the education- and labor-market institutions that were the foundation of a 20th-century system are out of sync with the 21st-century knowledge economy.”