 Hi, I'm Nona Willis-Ironowicz. I'm a journalist and contributor to NBC News where I report on education and poverty. And I've been sort of preoccupied with my own generation, the millennials, pretty much since everything went to shit in 2008. Let's start there because this was kind of like an aha moment for me. I'm 30, I was a few years out of college and the economy crashed right as Obama was getting elected and it was this really emotionally intense moment for me and everyone around me. We were kind of, I mean this was like our JFK assassination like our Vietnam and I guess more to the point our depression where I just knew that this moment was gonna define the way we looked at the world for many years to come. And not every millennial was young and was old enough to vote at that point but we were all sentient humans and we knew that there was sort of this open global panic about the economy and what was gonna be and how it was going to affect our job prospects and in turn our American dream prospects, I guess, to borrow the term from, to sort of continue the term, the theme from the last panel. When I became a journalist and a reporter I just sort of naturally gravitated towards figuring out what was going on with our generation and I quickly dubbed us the crash generation because it's, as I said, this moment really defined this moment of severe recession that we're still in that sort of accelerated a lot of the economic patterns of the past several decades. The chickens really came home to roost right as we were trying to create a life. And there have been all these studies saying that we're materialistic or we're obsessed with money or we're obsessed with entrepreneurship but what I really think is that we're obsessed with this money that we can't have. That we're sort of, another way to say that I guess is class consciousness. We have this class consciousness because we sort of have to have this class consciousness. Not only low income millennials who grew up low income because every low income person has class consciousness you really don't have a choice but also these sort of downwardly mobile millennials that we've been talking about who thought everything was gonna be okay but then all of a sudden they realized it was maybe not going to be okay. Income inequality has been part of the conversation for years now I mean between Occupy and Mitt Romney's slip ups and just our everyday experience of realizing sort of generational income inequality and also how our generation has lots of income inequality within it. When I became a reporter and I started traveling across the country talking to young people about their economic circumstances I quickly realized there really was a very deep uncomfortable divide between downwardly mobile young people who were for lack of a better term broke not necessarily poor and sort of the permanent underclass who barely noticed the recession because they'd always been struggling and now it was just a little bit worse but it's a lot more dramatic of a fall from like the second to highest rung to the bottom versus second to last rung to the bottom. We really as a generation in one sense have similar experiences this common experience of coming of age in a depressed economy but we also depending on our income and education level have vastly different experiences and when we try to get classified as a generation some of those different experiences come into stark relief last year or I guess now a year and a half ago I took more than a month to go across the country and sort of see what the American dream meant to open millennials where they were moving why they were choosing the cities they were choosing and I saw a few different things. I saw the tension between sort of these entrepreneurial start-up millennials who are sort of life hacking their way through this economy armed with cultural capital and education if not actual physical dollars and in some ways they had to be knocked down a rung in terms of their expectations but in other ways they were doing fine on one hand and then I saw sort of these millennials in service jobs or low-income jobs who were realizing just how screwed they were and sort of arguing for it sort of had that occupy tinge right like I saw fast food workers arguing for a wage raise I saw minimum wage fights across the country I saw these sort of fights for a good economic baseline and what I realized is that these two groups were kind of talking past each other which I thought was totally unnecessary because those entrepreneurs could really use some sort of secure economic baseline there'd be a lot more of them if we had that and I also noticed sort of the I guess consequences of our risk averse generation I heard that word several times in the last panel and really how it's manifested in the way that I've seen it in my reporting is first of all where millennials are moving a lot of them aren't necessarily moving to these big cities that we thought that we could previously make it in we're not necessarily moving to LA or New York or DC so much as staying put where we grew up and sort of trying to make those places better I saw that in countless post-industrial cities like Detroit and Cleveland and even smaller cities like Harrisburg where these educated kids or maybe not even educated kids because that maybe would have been going to a community college but decided what's the point they're sort of making their home cities better rather than striving for this old model of economic security and risk averse also kind of came out in this paradox which I'm gonna ask EJVD about later which is that even though we are the generation that's supposed to be so entrepreneurial and like a large portion of us really wanna start our own businesses we really don't have, we have few and fewer opportunities to have that because the social safety net is making it more and more difficult for us to take risks and we might see a little bit of that change with the advent of Obamacare it's still a little early to see but again these two conversations are not mutually exclusive so without further ado I'm gonna give the floor to Bill Emmons who's from the Senior Advisor of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and he has a paper in the packet that gives a really good sort of overview of the policy landscape that American millennials are dealing with so do you wanna do it? Thanks, Nona. Yes, I'm gonna hit some of those themes and hopefully we can get some discussion about that. I also wanna pick up on something that my colleague Ray said not only that these are my own views but also how permanent are these discouraging income trends that we've seen just during the Great Recession? So I wanna refocus that to ask how permanent are the changes in the labor market that we've seen? So to do that I first wanna describe what economists believe has happened in our labor market and then maybe draw a judgment on why that matters so much for young people and then to the extent to which that is permanent. So first, what has happened in the labor market actually this goes back to before the Great Recession and so this is one of the startling things is that really the housing boom disguised what was going on in the labor market. We think that the real turning point was back around 2000 and that's what's playing out today but the underlying forces go back even further maybe a quarter century or more, things like globalization. We had a billion new workers enter the global economy with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of China and other emerging markets that's had huge effects on our labor markets. Liberalized trade and financial flows obviously also interconnected our economy with those of other parts of the globe. Technological advances, we're going hand in glove with all of that, information technology, communications. So the result is a very, very different competitive situation for workers, for companies in the United States then was faced even 25 years ago, let alone 50 years ago say when the baby boomers were or their parents were just getting started in the labor market. So these have come together and this is what economists now are talking about, the polarization in the job market. It's also sometimes called the hollowing out of the job market. The idea being that they're basically three clusters of skills or tasks that workers are asked to perform. There's the cognitive skill type of job, people who think for a living. There's also a large number of jobs that are routine tasks. These are manufacturing or clerical sorts of works and there's also manual labor which is important for a person to be there in person but doesn't necessarily require lots of education. So the hollowing out phenomenon is there seems to be a lot of growth in that cognitive skill part of the market. We identify those with college graduates. There's a lot of growth in the low skill, manual part of the market. It's the middle that's gotten slammed. The routine tasks, manufacturing, clerical, things that either can be replaced by a robot or somehow computerized or easily outsourced. And so you have this phenomenon of people with skills doing relatively well over the last couple of decades and lots of growth of low wage jobs but it's the middle, the so-called middle class job that seems to have gone away. So why does this matter for young people in particular? Well there appears to be, with that context, what some economists have called a great reversal in the demand for cognitive skill. So around 2000s, somewhere around the bursting of the technology bubble in the 90s, it appears that the demand for those college level jobs has stagnated and that seems to be true through to today. And so that means that there's downward pressure on wages even for college graduates and there is compression in the wages all across the labor markets with something that some economists call a cascading effect. So people with college skills are not able to get college level jobs and so they're working in jobs that don't require college. That puts pressure on workers with lower skill levels and on and on the people who would be displaced from those job markets are pushed down to even lower skill and at the very bottom, the people with the lower skills seem to be the ones who are dropping out of the labor force altogether. Now this affects young people most, for two reasons at least. One, the college attainment has increased dramatically among young people over a long period of time but especially even in the last few years. So just as the demand for those college level skills seems to have stagnated, we're coming with a larger supply. More college graduates who are finding very weak opportunities and then that triggers that cascading effect. The other aspect that's particularly important for young people is the downward flexibility, if you will, of wages at the entry level, which is much greater. It's easier for employers to adjust their entry level wages than it is to adjust the wages of somebody with more seniority and that obviously then affects the young workers. So that seems to be kind of where we are today that even though college graduates are doing better than people with less education, they're certainly not seeing their wages grow like they did in say in the 1990s and there's also a lot of underemployment among college graduates. And as I said, it has these cascading effects on lower skill levels. And so does it, to answer Ray's question in the labor market context, how permanent is this? Well, it looks like this is the way it is. This has now persisted for at least 15 years and it looks like this globalization is not going to reverse. Technology obviously is not gonna go away. And so it probably means that we will, to hit another theme Ray mentioned, we'll see this bifurcation in terms of the income growth, the opportunities that people face. College education and beyond is still gonna be relatively highly valued in the market, but it's not gonna be growing in terms of, again, comparing to the 1990s when there was just a huge increase in the demand and the wages, the opportunities for people with these skills, the growth of those opportunities doesn't look so good looking going forward. And again, going back to that billion additional workers, college and educational levels are rising rapidly outside the United States also. So it's a very competitive environment and I don't think there's any reason to believe that will change. And so as I say, both in terms of the job market and financially, we were sort of fooled by the housing bubble period. These underlying trends were there all along, they were playing out and now they've been revealed to be true. The crash phenomenon of 2008, 2009 was really, in my view, sort of a wake-up call. Now it sort of shows us the very, very competitive global economy that we're working in, the critical level of skills. And that is, I think, what we're looking at. I also briefly, in the background paper, discussed some policy options and maybe I'll just briefly touch on that and maybe wanna come back to it. It seems that kind of conventional approaches to what would you do about this just don't seem to be terribly promising, in my view. One idea would be, well, lots of more macroeconomic stimulus but really monetary and fiscal policy, if anything, are probably going to be tighter in the future than they are today. So I don't think we can count on that. Some people have talked about raising the minimum wage and although that would have some benefits for some lower-wage, lower-skilled workers, it actually hits the lowest skilled workers and disproportionately young workers and people of color hits them the hardest. It would most likely reduce opportunity there so I don't think that's really an overall solution. Some other ideas maybe we can get to in the discussion but I think the typical policy levers that we might look for are not that effective, I think, given that this is really a sort of a seismic change in the way the US economy operates because it is part of that global economy. Yeah, and I mean, I was sort of as like a 24-year-old very disheartened to realize that even goes beyond 2000. I mean, this has been happening for many decades and sort of the proliferation of the service and retail economy really, again, was a wake-up call in 2008. Well, wow, this is really our new reality and the only thing that the recession really did was sort of bring these issues to the fore which may be a blessing in disguise, considering, I mean, depending on what happens. So I'd like to turn the conversation to the work of Elizabeth Jacobs. I'm really interested to hear how you feel that income inequality and by extension kind of like racial, socioeconomic, and education divides play into this conversation of what will become millennials because one of my pet peeves when I first started this work is when people said millennials like on the cover of Time Magazine or whatever, they were really sort of just using the shorthand of like white, like downwardly mobile millennials and they weren't necessarily talking about class dynamics within our generation. So can you comment on this? Sure. Oh, I'm sorry, introduce yourself. My name is Elizabeth Jacobs. I'm the Senior Director for Policy and Academic Programs at the Washington Center for Equal Growth. We are almost a year old and we are a grant-making institution dedicated to accelerating the knowledge of how inequality and other structural changes in the U.S. economy are impacting our country's economic growth and dynamism. So we fund academics and we also work really hard to figure out how to connect top academic research to policy so that we've got evidence-informed policy going forward. So your question is spot-on and actually what I've been thinking about picks up really nicely from where we left off and that the way that this panel was framed out was kind of what did jobs look like post-recession? And kind of any time anyone asks me that question, I have a really hard time answering the question as asked because I come back to thinking about everything we know about the economy is really, it's been going on for quite some time, the kind of main underlying trends that really came to a fore and that we're grappling with in the context of a labor market recovery that's been kind of wobblier than I think most workers would like. The answer really, it goes back to what we've already started talking about are trends that have been going on for some time. And so I've kind of three broad ones in inequality which was the question directed at me as well, I'll start and then I have two others that I just wanna touch on. And to the inequality point, I mean just some like basic facts which I suspect everyone in this audience has probably heard some version of but I always find it good to sort of start with the basics from World War II through 1970, incomes from the top to the bottom, it didn't matter if you were in the bottom quintile or the very top, everyone's incomes roughly doubled over that period. The economy grew, everyone's incomes grew roughly about the same. We still had plenty of inequality, America has never been a hugely compressed nation but we were seeing broadly shared growth and prosperity. Starting in around 1970 for reasons that we've touched on already in terms of globalization, there are also some major policy shifts that eroded collective bargaining power and some institutional changes in the way we did policy. Things changed and between 1979 and 2010, so sort of post-recession but this is really about a story pre-recession that just came to a fourth of a session. We saw the bottom quintiles incomes grew by about 40%. The top quintile grew by 300%. So that's like a vast, vast change in what economic growth meant for American families and just sort of the lived experience. And so that applies to millennials, it applies to all of millennials. Parents, I'm like almost a millennial so I'm trying to decide if I should say like we or you. I'm not sure they're like, but I can't make you like me better, which I'm like, post-1980 I guess. Yeah, and I miss it. My little sister is a millennial so I'm like very close. In any case, these are changes, the reasons to think that they're obviously impacting all of our lives, not just millennials. The fact that they've impacted parents' lives I think is important in thinking about the generational relationships and what millennials have to fall back on in terms of parental support. But I said all of that out there because that's really a sort of broad context for thinking about the economy that we're trying to fix is not just a post-recession economy, it's really kind of a bigger trend. And in that inequality context, there are a couple different ways of kind of cutting up this broad concept of economic inequality. Inequality is very abstract so there are a lot of ways of trying to make it somewhat more concrete. One of them is just this idea of the middle class running to stand still. Middle incomes have grown. They have grown so I should sort of stop with the period there. Middle incomes have grown but almost all of that growth is due to increase women's labor force participation and increases in women's earnings. Men's earnings have actually been falling at the middle for quite some time. So that's like a really big thing. It's a big thing for everyone. It's been a big thing for a while but I think it's a particularly big thing for millennials in thinking about and if the way that those economic changes are impacting the way that millennials are making life choices, I know I think tomorrow there's gonna be a discussion about work family and how all of that works. And I think taking into account what these economic changes have meant is sort of how they've incentivized or not incentivized making choices about family structure, about when you have kids, all of that really sort of ties together and I think is under this inequality umbrella. And then the other way that I'll talk briefly about inequality that I think has implications for what we're thinking about in terms of the future of the labor market is this runaway rich concept. I mean the middle classes remain basically flat line and the real kind of story in terms of the rise in inequality, particularly in the last decade has been all about the top just totally running away from the rest of the income distribution. And there's one version of that, one take on that story that says, well, it doesn't really matter. Americans, we like it when people do well. America is all about being able to succeed beyond your wildest dreams. And so we should really be worrying about what's happening at the bottom and the middle. And if we've got some super rich people who are now not just super rich, they're like ooh, we're rich, then great, that's fine. I would argue that I think there's good reasons to be concerned about having the rich pull incredibly far away from everybody else. And there's a long list of reasons why starting with basic social cohesion and having a society where everyone's kind of experiencing some semblance of the same existence, but setting aside that kind of more kumbaya version of it, I think there are also some economic reasons to be really concerned about having a rich that's pretty detached from the rest of the country. Some of that is in terms of the ways that people have made their money and where money is kind of sitting at the very top of the distribution isn't necessarily being productively distributed downward in terms of job creation. So that's one piece. You can also just think about we tax money at the top very differently. The ways that people at the very top have made their money have come in forms that because of the way our tax code is written, our tax is at a much lower rate. So we're actually, as a country, as a society, in terms of the resources, we're able to then put back into public goods like education, like social insurance policies, all of the safety net kind of things that we'd like to see in addition to the skills and job training, human capital development stuff that I think we'd also like to see. We don't necessarily have the resources that we should if we were actually kind of taxing everyone and all different kinds of income in the same way. So there's a lot of conversation to be had about why we should care about top end inequality, but I think often that piece gets lost or gets kind of shoved aside. It's like a really crazy lefty thing to say and I come at this not, I don't think it's a crazy lefty but as someone who's really trying to figure out why inequality matters for economic growth because ultimately what's gonna create jobs for millennials for everybody is growth and figuring out kind of the different levers that we have and what kinds of problems are problems in this context. I think kind of bringing that back into this conversation is really pretty important. So that's my inequality piece. The second piece is instability and again this is something we've touched on already, both, I mean already on this panel and in the prior panel, but we know prior to the recession from basically the same period that inequality has been rising, family income volatility has been rising as well. And now that's like a no brainer after the recession, like many, many, many people saw their incomes completely fall apart and it became like a not interesting conversation to have but as someone who's very much part of that conversation in really like the decade before the recession, I can tell you that it was like a hotly contested topic, this idea that family incomes were less secure than before. And when I say that, I mean there are a bunch of different ways of measuring it, but just this idea that your year, your two year, your five year income as an individual or as a household might bounce around. So you can imagine having pretty stable income but then you also can imagine your income is cut in half for the variety of reasons why you can see that happening. And there was real debate in the economics profession as to whether this was like a thing or not. Was it a thing and should we care? And then the recession happened and everyone stopped arguing about it because obviously it was a thing and we should care and so it became less interesting but I like to point out that it like it's actually wasn't new to the recession. This idea of having family's income swing around pretty wildly. So just to give you a concrete number for how to think about this, one way of measuring income volatility is just this idea that your income would be cut in half over the course of a year. So 50% drop in income. In the early 1970s, you had about a 4% likelihood of that happening by what's, I wanna get the date right so I don't give you a bad stat. I wanna say it's by 2007. I think that was the last date. It might be 2008 but pre-recession. You were up to a 10% chance of having a family income cut in half. So it's a pretty big rise over time and that's predating the recession. And I think this idea of instability I mean incomes are one way of talking about it but this theme has bubbled up in a lot of different ways that I think is pretty important in thinking about what it means to be an American and particularly a working American. You have instability in terms of incomes. There's increased attention to another thing that people in a sort of micro community have been focused on for a long time and it's become a much broader national conversation now I think about job stability and predictability. So in terms of work quality which is a huge thing going back to where we started with Anne-Marie's opening remarks about work, family and flexibility. There are different kinds of flexibility. Employers have a lot of flexibility right now. In no small part thanks to technology that lets them kind of map out with algorithms exactly when they need however many workers. As a worker that means that there are many people who have no idea what their schedule is gonna be like for the next week. In some cases for the second half of the week. And you know I have two kids. I have a lot of flexibility in my life. A lot of flexibility, not that much predictability but a lot of control over when I am where. And it's really hard even for me to manage that as someone who does, you know I am economically stable and have flexibility. So when I think about what that means for a family if you're a single parent and you don't know what your job hours are gonna be the next day. You don't know how much income you're gonna have to bring in. It's pretty much impossible to create a stable family life for your kids. Let alone high quality, early education. All of the things that everyone knows that they're supposed to be doing. So that kind of instability theme is the second one I would touch on as a pre-recession and what we're now grappling with in the context of the recovery. And then the last thing is mobility. There's been a one more minute for this. I know. I'm sorry. And this is a really quick point because I think we talk sometimes you hear that our mobility has gone down. I think the best studies suggest that economic mobility in the US, your chances of moving from the bottom to the top haven't changed all that much. But what it means to have flat mobility in a society where the lungs are moving farther and farther apart and where people's economic lives are increasingly unstable. It means something very different than it did several decades ago where you had a 9% chance of going from rags to riches that 9% chance of what that means and the outlook for millennials, for our kids, for our parents is very different than it was in the past. So I will leave it at that. So I just wanna make sure that we get to questions. So unfortunately, I'm gonna have to squeeze you guys in in the last few minutes and then we'll have 10 or 15 minutes for questions. So I guess you can really have this conversation without talking about education and an extension of education and the credentials that people need to be upwardly mobile, to have a stable income. So quickly, can we talk about how education fits into this conversation of how millennials weigh the cost-benefit analysis of getting this education and maybe having income and reflect that, but then maybe also having loans or having to be taking the time. Okay. In a few minutes. Sorry. My name is Rich Dietz, I'm with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I'm gonna try and do this as quickly as possible. So I'm gonna address this question of college graduates and just about this decision about whether to go to college. We've heard the stories about how tuition has been rising, debt has been mounting, unemployment has risen, under-employment as already been defined as the bill that we talked about has been rising. It makes a lot of money, it's a lot of questions whether even going to college is worth it these days. I wanna kinda make three points. First, if you look back historically, people have always had difficulty transitioning into the labor market. People that enter the labor market in the early 20s after getting a college degree always have high unemployment, always have difficulty finding a job that requires a degree. This transition has been happening for decades. So in that sense, what millennials face is nothing new. But it's much more common now because the labor market has become so much worse compared to generations past. So it's much more common, much more pervasive. But if you're gonna do the cost benefit, there's a couple of things to keep in mind. One, what happens to you when you're in your 20s does not determine whether a college degree is worth it. You have to look at what your whole working life is going to be like over 40 years or more. So that's one mistake people make is thinking about what happens right after they graduate is really, where to put all the attention about whether a college degree is worth it. The other thing is that what really determines the value of a degree is not how you do now relative to how people did in the past. That's how well you do now relative to how well you do if you didn't have a college degree. And the fact is that gap between people who have a college degree and those who haven't has not changed. Wages have fallen for the average college graduate, especially over the past few years. That's true. Wages have fallen also for people without a college degree. Prospects for people, especially in terms of finding a job if you don't have a college degree, but a poor now, especially compared to the past. That's what you should be looking at when determining whether a degree is worth it. You may not be doing as well as your parents did, but for sure you're going to do better than, you know, on average than if you did not get a degree. The last thing I want to make a point of is that not all college degrees are equal. A lot, as matter, a big determinant of how well you learn in the labor market once you get a degree is what field you're in. So we talk about college degrees if they're all equal, but they're not. Quantitative degrees, those in fields like engineering, math and computer things, things that require technical training, the education health sector, segments of the economy that have been growing for the past decade or more, even throughout the recession. Favorite areas in which people who have those majors have much better prospects in the labor market in terms of finding a job, finding a job that requires a degree, and getting good wages. People that have general degrees, liberal arts, communications. This is no rank in anybody who's got these degrees. I'm not saying anything about you guys in particular. In general, people who have these broader degrees that are not specific, that are not technical, are having a much tougher time in the labor market. What this means is what's different from millennials, it seems to me, compared to past generations is going to college and just sort of finding what interests you through luck of the draw, not getting any guidance, getting a degree in something that seems kind of fun. That's becoming a thing of the past. And I think we're transitioning into a circumstance because of the labor market and because of what's going on now where what you major in is much more important. If what you're worried about is finding a job, or if what your concern is about what wages you're gonna earn, you have to think more carefully about what your major is. I think that's a responsibility that lies on the parents. It's a responsibility that lies on you as a student. And even more so, I think it's a responsibility that lies in the higher education institutions who I think need to do a better job trying to steer people on what to major in, and nor that's gonna be a subject of what's talked about later today. How is it? That's impressive. So the last thing I want to bring up before we go to questions is this issue of entrepreneurship because that's sort of a buzzword that everybody in some ways holds up as the solution to our beleaguered generation. Well, if you can't find a job, make your own job, start your own thing. But the paradox, which I alluded to earlier is that even though this generation has had the most encouragement and exposure to this kind of thing, we all want to be Mark Zuckerberg, we all want to be a 27-year-old who's making billions of dollars and kind of beat the system, it's harder than ever to really go out on your own given the structure of our economy. So EJRE, why don't you introduce yourself and then sort of address that point as it relates to what we've been talking about. Sure, great. Okay, well I feel like Nona stole most of my speech just because it's actually great to hear somebody coming from a totally different perspective. So my name is EJ Reedy, so I work at the Kaufman Foundation, we're the largest foundation that has a focus globally on entrepreneurship. So we're obviously very deep into this topic. Now, since I don't have a background paper in your reading, I just kind of want to get a sense from the audience also, I don't want anybody to pull anything as you're transitioning to lunch, so I'm gonna ask you to raise your hand here in a very simple question. So when we talk about entrepreneurship, we've talked a lot about the general economy, everything else, how many of you actually believe that entrepreneurship trends within the U.S. economy are now at their highest level in terms of historical records? So just a quick show of hands if anybody believes that. It's a trick question. Wow, all right, that is incredible. And so I'm assuming everyone else believes that they're the lowest trends. Well, this is obviously a more informed audience than any I've ever talked to in any regard. But we're just doing a better job of getting out some of that message. So yes, U.S. entrepreneurship rates have been plummeting for a long period of time, actually following a lot of the same patterns that were discussed earlier in some instances, view of change kind of starting around 2000, 2001, definitely a shift beginning in about 2006 and have more recently kind of leveled out at what we see as kind of a new low or a new kind of level of stagnation in terms of new employer business creation. So there's lots of ways to look at entrepreneurship and I don't want to get into the nitty gritty in this regard, but one of the things that we're focused on are those more high growth potential businesses. And so that's an area of particular concern and also an area of great potential when we're talking about millennials. Now, when none of us bringing up the entrepreneurship paradox, millennial entrepreneurship paradox, this is something that we've actually been writing about more recently and it is absolutely the case that you can see trends that are underlying what's happening to the millennial generation that could lead you to expect that this will be the most entrepreneurial generation ever to occur in the U.S. economy. And there's also trends that would lead you to believe that this will be the great lost entrepreneurial potential generation to give you a sense of the kind of exposure that none of us talking about a little bit earlier related to entrepreneurship in 1985, there were about 250 college courses related to entrepreneurship that were taught across the United States. By 2008, that number had reached more than 5,000 courses that were taught on entrepreneurship across college campuses. Now, we ourselves at Kaufman and in partnership with other foundations have spent more than $300 million kind of spreading the word related to entrepreneurship on college campuses. And yet at the same time, when we look at the particular millennial, the aspects of the early career entry of millennials, we see both reasons for positivity and reasons for a negative take on what's going on. Now, if I'm taking the kind of negative perspective on what's happening with millennial entrepreneurship, I would talk a lot about early career job prospects. Now, one of the things that people often forget in entrepreneurship is that when you're looking at kind of the average career pathway towards successful entrepreneurship, often that actually starts with getting your foot in the door at an established business. It's not the most common pathway to actually be Zuckerberg or others in this regard. It's often a very, very common pathway to get 10 years, 10, 15 years of experience within an established company. Know your industry really, really well before you actually jump ship and start your own company. So that's a very common and stable kind of pathway for successful entrepreneurs in the past. And so obviously some of the trends related to early career prospects have been troubling. And then re-counseling market and student debt levels. A lot of the things that will be talked about today in relation to long-term trends and impact of student debt, yes it relates to say maybe reduced ability to purchase a home, things like that. On the opposite side from the entrepreneurship perspective, like home equity and your ability to actually leverage kind of credit markets, those are typically things that we associate with higher growth entrepreneurship. So definitely some reason to be concerned there. On the optimistic side, I already referenced the great exposure to entrepreneurship in terms of higher education. Obviously this is the most educated generation ever. And we all see this perceived kind of tech entrepreneurship boom. Whether or not this is actually a boom, I'm not totally convinced one way or the other. And particularly related to barriers to entry, it is as easy as ever to start a business. Whether or not you need incorporation. A lot of people go to legalism or some other mechanism to expedite you're starting a new business. Barriers to entry are really down. And you do see actually more new businesses that are starting without the need for any external capital. All right, so with that in mind, I'm just gonna kind of wrap up with a few things that are concerning. So while we talk about entrepreneurship, we really with entrepreneurship are thinking about the extremes. So Zuckerberg, as an example, is a total extreme. And there is a little bit of evidence that the particularly hyper young entrepreneurship boom is occurring. But when you look at the averages and you look at the averages across the country, one thing that is concerning particularly about the 20 to 34 year old kind of age group is that in 1996, when you're looking at kind of the composition of people that are becoming entrepreneurs, young people were actually the largest proportion of people becoming entrepreneurs. About 35% of new entrepreneurs were in that age group in 1996. By 2013, that had fallen to 22%. And so that's the kind of lowest percentage of new entrepreneurs that are actually in the younger age group. So we're definitely concerned. We're trying to figure out what's going on with some of the underlying levels of debt and other concern. But I think it's still out to say what's gonna happen with the millennial entrepreneurship paradox. Great. Well, thank you guys for cramming in so much information. You guys have so much good stuff that we don't have quite enough time for. But I wanted to make sure that we got to questions. We have about 10 minutes. So I think we can take a few questions. Now, how does this work that we? Okay. Okay. You were right over there. And then how many do I get? Three? Yeah. Okay. You were right over there and you were right over there. Hey, I'm Tori Stillwell with Bloomberg News. The former panel talked a lot about how this generation is the most diverse ever. I'm curious if you guys can think of any ways or have any data on how that'll impact the economy on ways we'll see that show up in the economy. Well, let's take this one. Elizabeth? I'm trying to think where to start. Well, I mean, so diversity, there's a lot of different ways of characterizing diversity. I mean, I think Sarah touched on this in the earlier panel in terms of a substantial number. I don't remember the exact number, but substantial diversity in terms of citizenship status. I think that's got huge implications for the labor market. If you've got some significant percentage of a generation that is not able to work on the books that has implications for those people's lives that has implications for the economy as a whole. It's implications for what kinds of taxes we're able to actually love. So that's a huge piece of it. And then I think, I mean, the inequality piece, I actually, when I was coming over here this morning was realizing that I'd be really interested to see inequality statistics for this generation. I've spent a lot of time looking at the income inequality numbers and related numbers, but I don't think I've actually looked at them specifically by like a generational cohort analysis. And so I don't actually have an answer for that other than to say that I think it'd be an interesting question. And maybe there wouldn't be all that much interesting and looking at it that way, but I do think that it would be good to know because it's a big generation, right? There's a big difference between, you know, 1980 is the sort of leading edge. So that's the oldest group, but there's a big difference between somebody who was born in 1980 and is 34 today versus somebody who just graduated from college or high school, who I mean, that's all, I think somebody can correct me if I've got my college wrong, but I think that's all one generation and the experience of those people is potentially going to vary. That's what happens when you've got a really big generation. So whether, you know, this millennials umbrella continues to be like the most useful lens for understanding labor market experiences. I think there's potentially a question there. And I'll leave it at that because I talked for a while in my opening remarks. I want to thank a lot of people for the chance to. Do you want to say something? I mean, I would like to hear what you have to say about the entrepreneurial side because I feel like that's one of the most sort of the bastions of diversity that we have a lot of entrepreneurs are stratified by class and race. Yeah, so I'd say on the entrepreneurship side, you know, definitely within the kind of high tech sector you're seeing, you know, huge amounts of global diversity there. I think there's still a lot of persistent problems related to gender and other kind of racial diversity within entrepreneurship. So particularly when you're looking at the more higher growth potentials. So, you know, the gender as an example is still remains pretty close to two to one and a national average related to male to female kind of startups. And I think that there's still a lot to be done, particularly in this regard, to make entrepreneurship a little bit more available to everybody. So you do see some changes occurring, but definitely the baseline is pretty low right now in some regards, except in immigrant entrepreneurship. So immigrants continue to kind of skyrocket in a lot of the entrepreneurship kind of percentages. And so we just hope to allow that to actually lead to further growth. Here's a rough big question, but who in our room here has put in your knapsack or small suitcase gotten up and gone overseas, whether it's Europe or Asia or South America, who's taken a trip overseas and talked with some of the people who might be our customers over there. Well, we have enough, okay, good. I ask that because of the, can you hear me? In our panel discussion so far, we have mostly been looking at our own belly button. That is, where are the customers that are going to be buying these products and inventions that some of our new entrepreneurs are going to be getting into? I mention this because we have been lagging in the US in coming to agreements with Europeans and the Trans-Pacific International Agreement. These have just been waiting for someone to come see that America has so much technology and good products to sell. So for us here looking at the future of millennials, will we encourage the millennials to see that America has hardly been dipping into the world market, get in touch with the statesmen and politicians and teachers that America has been lagging in setting up conditions that will open up that market for us. We have about 300 million people in the US. There are five million people out there who could be, some of them could be our customers. So it's the think-take operation, the voice from the heroin to say, do your job, set up these international trade and investment relations so that our people can get into the world market. Okay, good question. I think that's exactly right, that part of globalization means the United States has to think globally and both politically, economically, absolutely. Is that it? Okay, last question, I guess. Hi, I'm Gregory with the CQ Roll Call. My question is for Ms. Jacobs. You mentioned inequality in our tax code. I was wondering if you could tell us what you think a more equitable tax system looks like when that provides the greatest economic benefit for the US economy as a whole. Well, first of all, even if I had an answer, I'm not sure I could give it in our remaining 45 seconds and I'll also say that I'm not a tax policy expert. I have a sense of the beginnings of the diagnosis, which is that we know that we tax different kinds of income very differently and that a lot of the income that's accrued to folks at the very top of the distribution has been in forms that we don't tax at the same rate as the way that we tax earnings. So I guess I would start by saying that if we know that that's the beginning of the diagnosis of a problem, then thinking about how we can more effectively equally tax incomes without obviously to dramatically disincentivizing certain kinds of investment, it's complicated. So this is a long way of giving a non-answer and saying that I would put that out there to folks who are interested in looking and thinking about tax policy and sort of take my assessment of the fact that the way that we tax top incomes is potentially one of a variety of ways of rejuvenating the health of the economy. But that's a place to start, but I do not begin to pretend to have a comprehensive prescription for tax reform. I think there'll be plenty of people in this town who'd be happy to answer your question more accurately and more pointedly in the coming one month. So, yeah. Okay, well, that's all the time we have. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you.