 Thank you. It's such a pleasure to get to speak with you today. The White House just put out last week a report on millennials, which some of you may have seen and if you haven't seen it, I'm here to tell you what we put in it and why we thought it was important to think about millennials. So, one of the things that the Council of Economic Advisers we try to do is take a long run look at where we see economic growth going, how we see the economy changing and how we see the labor market changing. We earlier this year released a very intensive report on what we saw happening with labor force participation, which pointed out that, you know, the half of the decline in labor force participation since 2007 is due to the aging population and that aging of the populations also keeping down potential growth rates for many decades to come. So, the other end of that spectrum is to say, well, what's going on with young workers today? And the most obvious thing is that particularly for millennials, many of them came of age at a time when unemployment was high. And the very unfortunate fact is that research shows that when you enter the labor market when unemployment is high, it has negative effects that persist for many decades, maybe even for your entire lifetime. So, that's kind of a depressing place to start. But let me step back and say, so what we wanted to do was look at what makes this generation unique, what we think are the particular advantages of this generation and then how do we think about it in the context of a generation that got hit by coming of age and the worst downturn since the Great Depression? So, we started with the fact that all of you know, which is that millennials are large and diverse, the largest generation at this point and the most diverse. One of the things that I didn't know when we started on this, though, is that a lot of that diversity comes from the fact that there is a larger share of young adults who were foreign born. This is not new to U.S. history. It's actually a return to the kind of immigration patterns we saw at the beginning of the last century. So, having 15% of the 20 to 34-year-olds being foreign born is consistent with the kind of things we saw in the 1920s and actually a little bit lower than what we saw in 1900, 1910. But much higher than what we saw as recently as 1990. So, the next thing we took a look at was just what are the characteristics of millennials? And I'll tell you, my background you heard is that I'm an academic and I have done a lot of research on understanding why in the U.S. and actually around the world women's life satisfaction has declined over time relative to men's. That's a topic for a different day. But it led me to spend a lot of time looking at how young people view the world and the types of experiences that young people have to try to understand where these views of life satisfaction were coming from. And what I learned from that when I looked at surveys of 17 and 18-year-olds is that, first of all, when we think about balancing work and family, we're missing something that's really important to people's lives, which is community. And millennials perhaps more than even other generations really value community and their role in the community. Making a contribution to society is incredibly important to millennials, more important than it was to Gen Xers or to Baby Boomers. Being able to be a leader in their community is very important to millennials more so than to Gen Xers or Baby Boomers. So that idea that there are three domains that people are trying to figure out, work, family, and community, was something that I learned from these surveys of young people that go back to the 1970s. So you can consistently say, what did boomers think when they were leaving high school? What did Gen Xers think and what did millennials think? We also learned that millennials really value staying close to their friends and family. Like a teaser, hint, hint, will millennials stay home with their parents? Because when they were 18 or 17, half of them said living close to their family was important to them compared to 29% of Baby Boomers. So there's been a real shift in how the relationship that millennials have with their parents. Again, I have some research from many years ago which looked at the fact that the parents of millennials were investing more in their kids, more likely to breastfeed, more likely to spend time with them when they were young, more likely to be involved in homework. Both dads and moms spent more hours in the 90s and the 2000s parenting than they did in the 70s or 80s. As a parent, I'm pleased to see that that actually pays off your kids like you more when you spend more time with them rather than the opposite. The other thing that's really important to know about millennials is that they do have an ace in their pocket to overcome this recession which is that they're the most educated of any generation. And this has been an upward trend. People are becoming more educated over time but obviously there's a real difference when the majority of your generation is college educated compared to a much smaller fraction. And millennials are, in 2013, 47% of 25 to 34 year olds received a post-secondary degree. That was 31% in just 1992. So when I was coming out of college as a college graduate I was still much more of a minority of my generation. The kids graduating from college today a little bit less so and again that might help you think about the types of obstacles they face but also the types of opportunities they have with that human capital acquisition. The other thing that we showed was that there have been in recent years significant closures in racial gaps in educational attainment particularly with rapid increases and the enrollment rates of 18 to 24 year old Hispanics that have closed a gap in which Hispanics were less likely to be enrolled than blacks and are narrowing significantly narrow the gap between Hispanics and whites. Now what this means though is that millennials are more in debt because more of them have gone to college. It's not just the lucky ones that come from well off families where they've been able to get their parents to help pay who've gone to college but it's been lots of kids who had to rely on funding for college through student loans. And there is a graph there's a deck that's been passed around and if you look at slide page four you can see there's a figure from the report which shows that a big chunk of the increase in student loan comes from changes in enrollment in the share of borrowers. Some of it obviously comes from real net tuition increases and expenses but more of it comes from just changes in who the borrowers are. So that raises real questions not about how do we continue to fund higher education at a time when larger shares of people are getting higher education. But on the good news the other thing we show there is that among people who graduate only 3.7% borrowers defaulted on their loans within 6 years after their initial post-secondary enrollment. So graduation is something that's actually really important for people to be able to manage their loans and I think that's probably not surprising to anyone. The other thing that is of course different for this generation that's on the plus side is this generation has had better access to healthcare and that has come specifically from the ACA and the provisions that have allowed young people to stay on their parents health plans. The uninsurance rate among 19 to 25 year olds was pretty consistent around 35% prior to the ACA and it has now fallen by 40% and is now 20.9%. So real action to bring the share that are uninsured down and the hope is that also gives freedom for millennials to be pursuing things like innovation, small businesses, startups, things where they're not worried about whether they have health insurance because they can get it through the ACA. We've also taken a look to see how much they've recovered. Across the board what we see is the labor market is about 80% recovered so unemployment rates are coming back down. They have a little bit farther to go. They're about 80% of the way there and that is true when we measure across really broad ways of considering discouraged workers or marginally attached workers. A couple things to note which is that young people always have higher unemployment rates so full recovery for young people still likely means higher unemployment rates than one wishes they had. The other thing to note is that we do still have more elevated part time for economic reasons rate. What does that mean? That means people telling us they're working under 35 hours who wish they were working more hours. And I think that's a really important thing for us to be paying attention to to understand whether people are able to transition into the jobs that they want. One of the things we cover in the report is the fact that we've seen fewer labor market transitions which is particularly problematic for young people. Young people get a lot of wage increases in their 20s. Those wage increases are really important because that's sort of the path to career enhancements and higher earnings over their lifetime. And this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to enter the labor market or to be in the labor market in your 20s when there's a period of enormous instability or lower job creation, higher unemployment because young people rely on changing jobs, getting promotions, to sort of climb what us economists call the age wage profile to be able to get to the top of the hill where you're earning more which typically happens in your sort of mid-30s. If you're not able to climb those stairs in your 20s you can find yourself falling behind and it can be difficult to make that up later on. Again, the hope is that the higher educational attainment of millennials is going to inoculate against some of that but it is something certainly as an administration and government that we're paying attention to making sure that we're developing other training programs that we're working with employers to facilitate the hiring of the long-term unemployed which is a problem for millennials as well as older workers and seeing sort of making sure that we're doing everything we can to have people get fully back in the labor market to the greatest extent possible. There's a lot of stuff to cover that's in this report. Let me just highlight two more things. One is that I already told you millennials are more likely to live with their parents and that is true. They're also less likely to own a home but the decline in them owning a home is actually not that far below a time trend line. In other words, they're not really that far below in terms of home ownership compared to where one might have predicted they would be if we hadn't had a recession. They are much more likely to live with their parents so you can see that some of what's being crowded out is living in the kind of ridiculous multi-remate situations that I lived in when I was in my 20s including living in a fraternity house at one point. I can see why living with your parents can beat that. I really can. Some of that's what's going on but there is lower household formation and a lower headship rate. There are many factors that can explain that not getting promotions, not getting raises, being in school longer. All of these things contribute and the other thing is that for many generations people have been marrying later and they've been having their kids later and millennials are no different. They're having their kids later and they're marrying later even later. We see age of first birth at a very higher rate than we've seen in the past. We see the percent married who are 25 to 34 lower than we've seen in the past but the one thing that I think makes it very difficult to predict what will ultimately happen is that what we've seen with previous generations is mostly about marriage delayed. If you looked at unmarried 35-year-olds in 2000 you saw that a large share of them and I don't have it in front of me so I can't remember off the top of my head that they had married within the next 10 years by 2010 when they were 45 so there's just a lot of marriage that goes on later in life today that didn't use to go on which makes it difficult to know how much they will marry but of course by that and whether this is an effect whether the declines is somewhat driven by the economy or how much of it is just driven by the sort of patterns we've been seeing over time from generation to generation and the last pattern that I will talk about is the fact that millennial women have more labor market equality than previous generations and we looked across a variety of measures higher hourly earnings, higher mean earnings higher labor force participation more likely to be employed than 18 to 34-year-olds in the past and of course this is a great thing because they're also more likely to be educated than millennial men so we certainly want to make sure millennial women are able to participate and able to work in whatever occupations they choose because they have a lot of skills and a lot of education and making sure that we're adopting policies that help them figure out and help millennial men figure out how they're going to balance work, family and community as an important goal of this administration so why don't I end there and I don't know if we were supposed to set this up for questions and... Yeah, sure. Can you get actually to talk about your... Hey, not talk loud. Does the tendency to switch jobs less that you guys found does that break down by education level or by job type? Like professional versus non-professional low-age jobs? So I... What I can tell you is this is being seen across the board so I don't know the answer to that for millennials exactly but this idea that people are switching jobs less staying with their employer more is happening across the board, across age groups and has been happening over time for many decades so there is a decline in new firms opening there is a decline in job switching behavior and millennials aren't that different from other people in that respect but it is still at a lower level today than young people have experienced in the past and we're still trying to figure out what that's going to mean for them. On the one hand, it can be great to stay with an employer who wants to invest in you, they think you're not going to leave because people tend to be in more stable jobs on the other hand, if it's because there's a lack of opportunity to move to something better then we want to make sure that we are removing any obstacles that are creating a lack of opportunity because we want people to obviously be able to shift jobs to be able to be as productive as possible but it is across the board when you're looking across all ages it is sort of an across-the-board phenomenon that's not related to one particular industry or one particular education group or age group. Bill Lemons of the St. Louis Fed could you speak a little bit about the outlook for black and Hispanic millennials? Yes, so I mean what we've seen there's a couple things there one is that when we look at the recovery we see that there's similar percent recovered but of course they're recovering to higher unemployment rates so the persistent ongoing challenges that young people of color particularly blacks and Hispanics have faced are ongoing so I think you know so then there's a number of things that we've been thinking about in terms of how to address it one of the issues there's particular challenges for young men of color is being addressed in the president's My Brother's Keeper initiative and you know there are some really daunting statistics you know young men of color are half as likely to be employed today as they were in 1950 half as likely as a big decline sort of jaw-dropping decline so making sure that we're doing again everything we can to help people reach their full potential means focusing particularly on people who have faced the greatest challenges and that includes young people of color the other you know there's sort of other policy aspects that I think are really important I mean the fact that the ACA provides access to insurance is particularly important for lower income workers and so there's a number of initiatives that are being taken to sort of address workers across the spectrum increasing access to apprenticeship programs and making sure that there's more access for women and more access for people of color as part of the things that have been taken on but you know the ongoing challenges that were present before the recession are still being taken and so there's a number of initiatives that are being taken that were present before the recession are still there and one of the things that we've been doing in the administration is now that we see you know that we're the recovery is ongoing we need to go back and address some of these ongoing challenges related that wage stagnation and labor force participation and a bunch of ongoing problems because those things aren't going to recover naturally they're going to require some sort of active push great thank you guys so much it was great talking to you