Jim Tankersley and Scott Clement report for the Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2015, that according to a new Fusion 2016 Issues poll (in conjunction with WaPo), young Americans are significantly more pessimistic about the possibility of success in America than their counterparts were in 1986.
What is even more significant is that the rise in pessimism among millennials is concentrated among white people, and especially pronounced among whites who do not have a college degree.
The Fusion poll replicated the questions from a Roper/Wall Street Journal poll of young Americans that was conducted in 1986. Both polls posed a series of questions about the American Dream: what it means to individuals, whether it actually exists and, if it does, how hard it is to attain.
Here are the survey findings:
- In the three decades since the 1986 poll, young Americans who said the American Dream “is not really alive” increased from 12% to 29% today.
- The increase among young whites is nearly triple — from 10% to 29%.
- Young whites with no college degree are more pessimistic than those who are college graduates: 33% vs. 20%. That means 1 in 3 non-college educated young Americans do not believe in the American dream.
- In contrast to the sharp increase in pessimism among young white Americans, the poll found no statistically significant change among young Americans of color over the decades. In 1986, they were about twice as likely as whites to say the American Dream does not exist. Now, whites and non-whites are about equally pessimistic.
- Young Blacks are more downbeat on a different question — whether the American Dream has meaning to them personally. Almost one-third said it does not, roughly double the rate of whites and Hispanics.
- Among those who said the American Dream still means something to them personally, whites are far more likely to say the dream has become harder to achieve compared to a generation ago:
- More than 60% of white college graduates and 70% of white non-college graduates said the American dream has become harder to achieve.
- 53% of non-whites said the dream is harder to achieve.
Both white and non-white young Americans have experienced similar income trends over the last 30 years:
- The median household income for whites aged 25 to 34 was $58,197 in 2014, according to the Census Bureau, up only slightly from 1987 after adjusting for inflation.
- The median income for blacks of the same age was $43,957, also a slight increase from 1987.
- Hispanics saw a more significant increase of about 7%, from 1987 to $42,916 last year.
Millennials in general also define the American dream differently than Generation Xers did in the 80s. Today’s young people define the dream as starting a business, and are less likely to say owning a home or having “freedom of choice in how to live one’s life” and the ability to become wealthy are part of the American Dream.
This Fusion 2016 Issues Poll was conducted by landline and cell phone interviews Nov. 4-18, 2015, among a random national sample of 935 adults age 18 to 35. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points for the full sample, including the survey’s design effect.
~Eowyn
