Opinion: Three ways to help millennials overcome the cost of living crisis

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion on CNN.

Millennials, as you’ve have probably heard, have gotten pretty screwed.

By some accounts, we’re the most educated generation in American history, but also underwater with educational debt. We haven’t amassed the kind of wealth our parents had at our age, and it’s unclear whether we’ll ever catch up. We’ve been slower to purchase homes in part because Baby Boomers won’t sell theirs, and so we’re throwing our hard-earned cash away on skyrocketing rents, which in turn puts saving for a 20% down payment further out of reach. We’re so financially stressed that we can’t afford to have kids, and by staying childless we’re breaking our Boomer parents’ hearts.

I wrote an entire book on the plight of Millennials, on the many advantages Boomers enjoyed and then hoarded for themselves, and what Boomers and Millennials alike don’t understand about each other. There is much doom and gloom to be found in nearly all of the reporting about Millennial life, and things aren’t looking much better for Gen Z and younger generations. But there are also tremendous opportunities. American Boomers enjoyed unprecedented wealth and opportunity not just out of sheer luck or even sheer numbers, but because the government made unprecedented investments in them: in their education, in their health, in their ability to live independently.

Our country could do the same for Millennials. It may, frankly, be too little, too late for many of us. But it could ensure that the Millennial generation is an unfortunate aberration, and that future generations return to a path of prosperity and upward mobility.

The “how to fix it” list could itself fill an entire book. But here are three priorities:

Make higher education much more affordable

One of the more troubling shifts of the past American decade has been the broad loss of faith in higher education. While 74% of young adults a decade ago agreed that a college degree is very important, only 41% say the same today. Nearly half of Gen Zers say that a high school diploma or GED is sufficient to ensure financial security. And they were the least likely among generations to say that colleges and universities are having a positive effect “on the way things are going in this country today.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a smaller proportion of high schoolers are continuing on to college. It’s a decline not seen around the rest of the developed world, where higher education is expanding. At its core, this uniquely American rejection of higher education seems to be about value: Given all we’ve heard about how even well-educated Millennials struggle financially, the price tag on a degree in the US just doesn’t seem worth it.

The truth is, of course, more complicated. A college degree does mean, on average, significantly better wages, and graduates of elite universities do best of all. Those higher wages, though, can be offset by debt. And people who take out loans to go to college but don’t graduate see the worst of both worlds: lower wages and higher debt.

Jobs that require a college degree are also likely to remain higher-paying, while those that do not seem to be in a race to the wage bottom. Life for Americans without a college degree has become more perilous by a range of measures: This is the group most likely to perish from “deaths of despair” and to live in communities rife with alcoholism, substance abuse and financial struggle. And American economic growth and global competitiveness both require a workforce with plenty of college graduates.

This is not a problem that one-time student loan forgiveness is going to solve. We need massive state and federal investment in education: in higher education, to make college much more affordable, and in K-12 education, to ensure that where a child grows up doesn’t limit her prospects for college and beyond. The federal government needs to regulate the student loan industry and end the proliferation of predatory and exploitative for-profit educational institutions. Not every student needs to go to an Ivy League school, but every student should have access to an affordable, high-quality four-year education near their homes.

This is largely a solved problem across Europe. We could make it happen here in the US, too. Doing so would benefit young adults, of course, who could graduate without the weight of five- or six-figure debt weighing them down from the start. But it would also benefit the nation as a whole, equipping us with a more sophisticated workforce better prepared for the technological evolutions of the coming decades.

Provide universal low-cost child care

From my vantage point, the single highest barrier to Millennial economic stability is child care. Millennials are now squarely within childbearing age, and while many of us are forgoing children, most of us are or will be parents – but we’re having fewer children than women of previous generations, and we’re having them later. The reasons behind that are complex, but cost is certainly among them: The United States has some of the highest child care costs in the world.

And that isn’t because American kids are getting better-than-average care; it’s because our government simply doesn’t invest in it. The US government spends, on average, $500 per child per year on early childhood care costs. The average spent among OECD countries is $14,436.

Affordable, high-quality, universal child care helps mothers, and particularly low-income mothers, to stay in the workforce, which pays dividends for their families. Child care programs help to prepare kids for school and may keep them more active and socially engaged. As it stands, screens have become a stopgap measure for poor families, with kids in low-income households spending many more hours looking at them than kids in more affluent ones – something that was exacerbated during the pandemic.

Social conservatives often prefer that mothers leave the labor force and stay home with their children, which is one reason there has been such broad resistance to universal child care on the American right. The demand that women stay home seems to be based more on nostalgia and gender traditionalism than evidence, of which there’s plenty, that working mothers bring significant benefits to their children, to themselves and to national economies.

The reality, for many American families, isn’t a well-paid dad who can support a family on a single income and a mom whose primary aspiration is to dedicate herself to raising children, were it not for manipulative feminists and scheming liberals who pressure her into the workforce. Much more often, reality is a complicated mix of mothers who want many sources of purpose and gratification, as well as the freedom and pride that financial independence brings; couples who need two incomes in order to raise their children in financial stability; and single moms who are the only person bringing home the bacon.

All of these groups would benefit hugely from free or affordable child care. It would radically decrease the stress American parents live under, it would enable parents to provide a higher standard of living for their children and it would give children a leg up.

It might also make having a child, or having an additional child, feel possible for a greater number of young people.

End the housing shortage

America’s housing system is broken, and not just because so many Millennials can’t afford homes. Millennials drove re-urbanization as many of us graduated college and moved to cities instead of returning to the small towns or suburban enclaves in which we were raised. But those cities simply don’t have enough housing units, especially affordable rentals for low-income people or starter homes (and even starter apartments) for those taking a big step into adult life. This housing shortage has expanded out into the suburbs and even rural areas.

This wasn’t the case for Boomers, in large part because the government invested in a massive expansion of housing stock during their early years. The federal government could do the same now, expanding tax credits and voucher programs. Cities could embrace growth and build, and tax homeowners who do not live in or rent out their units. States could expand aid to first-time homebuyers, ideally lowering closing costs for real estate purchases and making that so-hard-to-amass 20% down payment more doable.

And this is very pie-in-the-sky, but the US is far overdue for a total overhaul in property taxation. We are vastly over-reliant on property taxes for government revenue, which poses a big problem for homeowners who are just scraping by, as well as for retirees who may have paid off their homes but still owe a hefty tax bill every year. Property tax costs are inevitably passed down to renters, who also wind up paying more. And local property taxes, in turn, contribute to wildly unequal funding schemes for public schools, the outcome of which is that the kids in the richest enclaves also enjoy the best public educations — better-paid teachers, nicer facilities, smaller classes, updated textbooks, advanced science equipment, college and mental health counselors — while kids in poorer areas receive far less investment and far fewer educational resources.

This, too, hurts young families, who may spend beyond their means to get their kids in to a decent school district, or who see their children’s opportunities drastically diminished simply because a parent doesn’t make enough to move to a tony neighborhood. And it hurts children, who are, after all, future adults, keeping those who already come from challenging backgrounds at an even greater disadvantage, while giving the best-off an additional leg up. That’s fuel for growing inequality, and a compounding of the problems Millennials face for future generations.

There is much more than should be — could be, must be — done to help Millennials and the generations after us achieve the American dream (or at least financial stability). But there’s no time to waste. The oldest Millennials are in our early 40s, and the window to improve our future is rapidly narrowing. We may indeed wind up left behind. But the US can also refuse to repeat these mistakes and instead choose to invest in something better for the generations that come next.