News
Living With Your Parents Does NOT Make You a Loser
Forget Friends, forget Girls, forget that nagging voice in the back of your head that goes "Is it normal to still be living with my parents?" A recent study by the Department of Education has found that 27 year olds are more likely to be living with their parents than with roommates. In 2002, researchers started tracking about 15,000 male and female high school sophomores — most of whom are now 27. In 2012, those same subjects were handed an extensive survey to determine their experience of adulthood. The results were, well, kind of mind-boggling.
More than 84 percent of today's 27-year-olds have some college education, but only a third have a bachelor's degree. Asians are the ethnic group most likely to have a bachelor's degree. So far, so good. But it all gets a little more depressing when it comes to dollar figures.
About 79 percent of today's 27 year olds have some kind of debt, and about 55 percent owe more than $10,000. In 2011, 27 year olds were more likely to be making less than $15,000 a year than they were to be earning more than $40,000. Ouch.
The whole owing-tens-of-thousands thing might explain why more 27-year-olds live with their parents than with roommates. In fact, The Atlantic has a nifty breakdown of where exactly you can expect 27-year-olds to live (check out all the charts on this study here):
Despite all the odds being stacked against them, some of today's 27 year olds still feel pretty good about their lives. 10 percent of those surveyed already felt like they had fulfilled their career goals. For the rest of us, moving out of Mom and Dad's seems like a good first step.
