 OK, good morning. We'll get the program underway. I'm Reed Kramer, your host and director of the Millennials Initiative here at New America. And the Millennials Initiative was created to acknowledge that today's young adults are coming of age in an era of economic uncertainty. And just as they're approaching their prime work and family-forming years, their poor finances are complicating the building blocks of success. And it was only a few years ago that the popular narrative kind of emerged depicting Millennials as this ascendant generation with attentive parents and dazzling technology and optimism about the future. Now, a lot of actual Millennials kind of resisted some of these generalizations that were foisted upon them. But they maybe didn't feel that they captured the diversity and the complexity of their experiences. But there still is this kind of coalescing force, which is reflected in a shared sense of economic insecurity and vulnerability, which is born of coming of age in the wake of the great recession. So we've seen stagnant incomes, volatile incomes. We've seen rising liabilities and debts and also very low savings and asset ownership. And all of these have given rise to a new narrative, which is that Millennials appear on a trajectory where they're unlikely to match the success, the economic success of their parents and grandparents. And as we're going to see this morning reviewing a lot of different data and evidence, the current generation, the wealth gap, the generational wealth gap has reached historic proportions. And it's already having real world consequences. There's an especially troubling, persistent racial wealth gap that is actually being reproduced among young adults today. We'll see that it's not just a legacy. It's being reproduced actively in current affairs. So what do we do about it? Can Millennials catch up? How should policy respond? These are the questions that we're going to talk about today and that are addressed in a new book released this week by New America called The Emerging Millennial Wealth Gap, Divergent Trajectories, Weak Balance Sheets, and Implications for Social Policy. And the book is a culmination of a year long research project, which is focusing on this new dimension of inequality in America today, which is generational. The publication, there it is, kind of connects a lot of cutting-edge research with commentary, and it features contributions from 22 authors in 14 chapters. There's interactive slides and graphs, thanks to our wonderful editorial team. And it really is an impressive, I think, body of work that shows what the trends are and what some of the issues are going forward. So what we're going to do today is hear from some of the authors and provide a few frames of reference. The data that's presented, the trends that are identified, are designed to explore some of the underlying dynamics that are driving the generational distribution of wealth. And collectively, the authors are contributing to a very constructive process to address this misalignment between public policy and lived experience. So I invite you to read their work, dig into the book, but also please that we can present highlights today. So we have three panels on tap for you. The first one's going to look at the generational balance sheet and components of the balance sheet. The second's going to focus specifically on the student debt issue. And then the third's going to explore implications for social policy. I'll also want to acknowledge up front the support of our funder. All this work's been made possible by the support of the City Foundation. And they've been supporting a wide range of efforts to promote expanding opportunities among young adults, both in the United States and worldwide. And their Pathways to Progress initiative, which has supported us, has just been wonderful. And it really gets right to the heart of the matter. And I'm very pleased to have Julie Hodgson here from the City Foundation, who's been a great partner in this work. Among other things, she supported a fellowship program. We ran here at New America last year, which identified some opportunities for some young people right out of college to come work at the think tank here. And they produced a lot of great work, which is also available online. So I've asked Julie to come help me welcome you and share a little bit about how cities approaching this work. Great. Thank you, Reed, for that kind introduction. And good morning, everyone. I'm really excited to be with you today as New America launches the emerging millennial wealth gap report. As Reed mentioned, I'm a program officer at the City Foundation, where we are committed to ensuring young people have the tools and resources necessary to navigate the obstacles presented by today's economy. Worldwide millennials make up approximately 50% of the global workforce. And yet today is complicated and rapidly changing socioeconomic environment is fueling insecurity. Young people are confronted with a vast array of challenges, including lack of quality education and jobs, growing economic inequality, climate change, and growing political tensions across their communities. As a response to many of these issues, the City Foundation launched its Pathways to Progress initiative nearly six years ago to invest in interventions that are helping young people pursue their career and economic ambitions by connecting them to on ramps to opportunity. By 2020, the City Foundation will have invested $150 million to impact the lives of 600,000 youth globally. And it's important to note the Pathways to Progress is really about partnerships, because we recognize that the magnitude and complexity of the issues facing young people today requires a holistic multi-sector response. And so that's why we've been supporting New America and Reed Kramer in this body of work to bring together a diverse group of policymakers, practitioners, philanthropists, thought leaders, to discuss the issues at hand, to share knowledge with one another, to explore trends, and engage in a solutions-oriented conversation about how the country can ensure access to opportunity continues to exist for future generations. Our hope is that the ideas presented in this report help spark your own thinking, as well as prompt all of us to further evaluate how we can support young people moving forward. Because ultimately, we believe it will require the strengthening of the entire youth serving ecosystem to ensure that young adults have what they need to rise above the challenges they face and create opportunities for themselves, for their families, and their communities. And so with that, I want to thank New America for hosting us today, and specifically, Reed Kramer, for his engagement and thoughtfulness over the past year and exploring the complex issues facing millennials. And we want to congratulate you, Reed, on this publication, as well as your contribution to the field. It's really been remarkable. So thank you. All right. Thank you, Julie. You've really been wonderful to work with. All right. So before we hear from the authors, just a few frames of reference here in my remarks. Millennials, who are we talking about here? Pew Research Centers done a lot of great work. And they've defined millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996, meaning that the youngest are kind of in their early 20s. The oldest are now entering their late 30s. And you can see the distribution there. The main caveat is that designing and defining generational names and labels is kind of an art. It's not a science. And it kind of collapses differences. And it kind of creates these arbitrary demarcations. But it gives us a group to work with analytically. We can compare them across time and also contemporaneously. And they're not just the future. They're right here. They're moving into their prime. They're setting trends. And they're the bridge to what's coming next. So they were born. America kind of had this mini birth boom. So there were relatively more of them than the generation Xers that I'm a part of. And today, millennials are 22% of the population. But they're 30% of the voting age population. They're 38% of the working age population. And they're already outpacing boomers. And by 2025, they're going to comprise 75% of the workforce. They share cultural experiences, historic events, formative experiences that kind of make them distinct from older generations. Certainly, technology gets a lot of attention. But here's a little timeline just to kind of jog our memories. There were some early events, like the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was the Columbine in Oklahoma city bombing. And we're kind of these disruptive events that might be early in their memories. Political polarization was kind of emerging with the Clinton era impeachment. And millennials were between 5 and 20 when 9-11 occurred. And they grew up during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then certainly the Great Recession looms large. And that's one of the themes that we're going to see today. They were between the ages of 12 and 27 when Barack Obama was elected president, first black president. And the youth vote played a big role in that. And then in 2016, the results of that election were pretty memorable and unexpected for millennials, to say the least. Maybe, election Donald Trump. So there's also a lot of indicators improved during, social indicators improved during their lifetimes. Violent crime fell sharply. Smoking, drinking, teen pregnancy all went down, along with other risky behavior. Now, there are downsides to making too many generalizations. But one of the issues with millennials is how diverse they are. They're really a generation that's defined by their diversity. And they're the most ethnically diverse that we've ever had in American history, except for the people that are born behind them and coming up next. Of millennials, 44% identify as something other than white, non-Hispanic. And it's the rising share of new minority groups, like Hispanics and Asians, that's really one of the key characteristics that distinguish millennials. So for instance, boomers, 7% were Hispanic. Among millennials, it's 21%. So that has tripled. And in the near term, the working population is going to have more racial and ethnic diversity. And the non-working population is going to be more overwhelmingly white baby boomers. So there is this kind of potential for cultural tension. But I want to focus more today on this kind of the economic experiences. And they've come of age at a time of historic concentration of wealth. This graph, which is in the book and is actually designed by my daughter, who is maybe not a millennial, she might be in the next generation. But it shows that when you rank by wealth, the richest 10% hold now 77% of wealth. And there were big changes since 1992, which is the middle bar there. Most of the changes, a lot of them occurred in the top 1%, which has been pretty dramatic, moving from 30% to 38% of wealth. And this means that the bottom share of families, the 90% of families, the wealth share has been falling for the past 25 years, dropping from 33% to 23% in 2016. Here's a little snapshot of wealth by age. And as you can expect, it goes up as people get older. The average person starts out in their 20s with very little savings in wealth. It grows through their work years and usually peaks. Historically, it peaked around the early 70s. But recently, that peak has really been pushed later. So the over 75 has the bigger number here in 2016. And this is what it looks like over time. This is the graphic depiction of the generational wealth gap expressed in terms of median net worth by households under the age of 35 and over the age of 75. And both cohorts lost wealth after the recession, but it's the older families that have gotten back on track. And really, the economic data, we're going to review it today in the first panel. It really shows that a lot of the younger families have fallen significantly behind older generations in terms of wealth accumulation. They're in a fundamentally different place economically. And I think that's going to have ramifications. The emerging, well, it's not emerging, but we've had a historic racial wealth gap. And it's been particularly devastating for communities of color. They've experienced discrimination, which is really a euphemism for brutal inhumanity and injustice, which has always historically has had huge economic consequences. But despite the civil rights movement, these have been largely unaddressed and wealth disparities have persisted. And in fact, as we'll see in the book, the chapter on the racial wealth gap shows how it's being reproduced in a very contemporaneous way. So it's not just history, this is current events. And if we acknowledge that the diversity of this generation is real and that there's been divergent experiences, then we have to look at those disparities. And that's what a number of the authors do in their chapters in the book. So what drives wealth accumulation? It's often income, which creates the ability to save. And that's where kind of coming of age in the wake of the recession comes in. The structure of the economy is different today in very fundamental ways. Although millennials are better educated and better credentialed, the labor market has been delivering jobs with kind of flatter wages and fewer benefits. There's been a rise of freelance work. There's been this drive for flexibility for employers and that's kind of left shorter employment, 10 years, less workforce attachment and an overall decline in income, but a rise in income volatility. So this is the gig economy. And the overall impact of that is millennials have earned 20% less during their lifetime than boomers had at the same age. And interestingly, the unemployment rate has come down in recent years and that figure's reported a lot, but the labor force participation rate for young adults between 18 and 34, that remains at really its lowest levels, participating in the economy, lowest levels in kind of four decades. And so I think people are underemployed in this economy. And this all impacts the balance sheet, which is kind of the wealth story. The balance sheet is weak and it's structured differently than it has been in the past. There is fewer mortgage debt but more student loan debt. There's fewer savings. There are fewer assets all together. And we're gonna hear a little bit about the housing story, which is central to this experience where home ownership rate is down but also the rate of household formation is down as well. And yes, rents are up too. So there's a lot of challenges in the economy. And there does appear to be an effect that the financial profile is impacting behavior of the millennial generation and these milestones of adulthood. I think that wealth matters. It matters to people's lives. And actually when I came to New America 16 years ago, I came to work with our asset building program, which was dedicated to the insight that savings and assets matter. It orients people to the future. It's an independent effect from just income alone and that even small amounts of savings can make a difference for people with low incomes. It helps them find pathways to the future and think about the future, move up the economic ladder. So I'm really pleased that my colleague, Ray Bouchera is on the program today. He's the one that was the founding director of our asset building program who I came to work with and he continues to be a real leading light in this work looking at family finances. And he's doing that from his perch at the St. Louis Fed with his team. And we're gonna hear from Anna Kent from his team about these wealth trends. So the milestones are changing, millennials are marrying less, they're marrying later, they're having fewer children. The overall birth rate is at a record low and we've seen these changes in home ownership. So that's kind of the groundwork, the setting, the frame today. What is to be done about all of this? Well, that's why we're here. I think there's value in surfacing these trends and reviewing the evidence and bringing different perspectives together. Millennials are also gonna be in their size, they're gonna be increasing their influence on public opinion and voting. And I think that creates opportunities for policy change. But without large scale policy change in a response, I think that a lot of the financial burdens of this particular cohort are gonna really reproduce these troubling disparities. And so it's a collective exercise to figure out how to respond and what to do next. So that's why we're here. So thank you. We're gonna move on to the presentations. I'm gonna have Anna come up and start us off and then we're gonna proceed, come on up Anna. And then here's your clicker. And then we're gonna have a few presentations following by Signa Mary and Young and then Jen's gonna come up and make some comments as well. Thank you. Thanks Reid. So as Reid mentioned, I work for the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank with Ray Bishara. And as an employee of the Federal Reserve Bank, I have to mention that these are my own views and not necessarily the views of the Fed, the Fed system, Board of Governors, et cetera. So I'm just gonna dive right in because I know I have limited time here. I liked that reteed up a lot of the themes. I'm gonna be talking about today. It makes my job easier, considering the amount of things I'd like to get to and tap. Reid mentioned the very wide range of experiences and ages within the Millennial Group. And that's why in our work, we actually focus on a more narrow group, just those born in the 1980s, headed by a family, headed by someone born in the 1980s. Because it's pretty easy to say, okay, I was born in this decade. It allows for better comparisons in our view. And as Reid mentioned, their financial outcomes are poorer than the generations before them. So if we look at what their wealth should be based on the experiences of all families, regardless of what age they are, we see that the 1980s, these older millennials, are behind and quite a bit further behind the expectations set by previous generations. This is another look at the generational wealth gap. If you look at the top, the very top, it's people born, people who are 65 to 75, at the bottom is 25 to 35 year olds. We see that that gap has grown over time and in fact is in this, from this time, spanned at an all time high. If you look at the very, very top of those people who are 75 compared to the very, very bottom, people who are born who are 25 in 2016, we see that their gap, the actual numbers is about 150,000, was in 1989. Now in 2016, that gap has grown by almost 100,000. So that's a significant growth, not just in the proportion, but the actual numbers as well. So our estimates, and I'll show you a graph of this, is that millennials, older millennials are actually about 34% below where we would expect them to be in 2016 for wealth. For income, there doesn't seem to be as much weakness. It's only 3% below. So there's a different story going on here and if we have time, we can get into why that might be. So we looked at perhaps some of the causes. We have one short term, we talked about the influence and the importance of the great recession on this generation. Many of them were just entering the job market. Many of them decided to go back to school and get further to their degree, et cetera. Some of them were just entering adulthood, right? The youngest born in 1980 were 18 in 2007 at the beginning of the great recession. So that's why we also focus on this group as opposed to say it was born in the 1990s because we can compare their outcomes before and after the great recession when they were, or adults, excuse me. Two long-term trends that I'll talk about too are just wealth redistribution from less to more educated families as well as from younger to older families. And all of these things combined, we believe has an effect on their lower and poorer wealth outcomes. So I apologize for the busyness of the slide. It was supposed to be built but that unfortunately did not transfer over. So bear with me, I'm gonna try to explain it. I'm happy to go through it at a later time as well. So the horizontal line, the zero, that's where we would expect families to be. So if they're above the horizontal line, we're saying that they're doing better than we would expect them to be doing at the same age as other families in the past. If they're below, that means where they're doing worse than our expectations would say. The groupings of blue bars, those are income in 2007, right before the great recession is that data. 2010, our point after the great recession that we have. And then 2016, the latest data that we have available. And the green bar grouping of bars are wealth. So if we just look at income and wealth on the line down there, that's whatever year the birth, the year of birth the families were in. So 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s. So from older to younger generations left to right. And what we see is that typically all families were doing pretty well at the peak of the housing bubble. They all had higher income and higher wealth than we would expect. The housing bubble when that burst, it pushed them below. Almost all families were pushed below both income and wealth. And then there was some recovery. We tended to see recovery, so that's the solid bars. The solid blue is income, the solid green is wealth in 2016. There tended to be some recovery by that point. And many families, particularly these older generations, 30s, 40s, and 50s, they were actually regained above average expectations, what we would expect them to be. For younger families, the story was a little bit different. So those born in the 60s, 70s or 80s, on the right side here is my mic on. No, when I move over, okay, sorry. But those in the 60s, 70s and 80s, you can see those solid green bars are below the horizontal line, meaning that they're below expectations. And the only group, those older millennials born in the 1980s, those were the only ones to not only lose wealth that we would expect from the Great Recession, but they actually feel further behind between 2010 and 2016. They were the only family to do this. And that's why this group is really concerning as to whether they're gonna recover in time to meet major life goals. All right, so I talked about the short-term cause. There doesn't really seem to be anything unusual about their savings. In fact, they're saving a little bit higher over right the 1970s group. They weren't heavily invested in housing. So hopefully in this discussion, I get to talk about some of the reasons why their wealth might be a little bit lower. But two of the longer-term causes I wanna get to really quick are wealth redistribution from younger, or excuse me, from less educated to more educated families. Here, I'm just showing you wealth. And the blue bars are non-grad families, what we call non-grad for shorthand. Those are families headed by someone with less than a four-year college degree. And the green are families headed by someone with at least a four-year college degree or grads. And what we can see is that if we cut out the 1930s, the very far left, if we just kind of take them as an anomaly, they're a little bit older here. And we just look at the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, those green bars are all kind of around the horizontal line, meaning that grads are all kind of hitting the mark more or less. Even millennial grads aren't that far behind the expectations we would predict. The story's totally different for non-grads, right? Each younger generation is farther and farther below that line. So in particular, the story is really worrisome for non-graduate younger cohorts. This just shows, I know it's kind of, there's a lot going on in this slide, this just shows that there has been wealth redistribution from younger to older families. The more those lines separate, the older families are on top, the younger at the bottom. That means that compared to 1989, there's been separation between those groups from what we would expect. In other words, the generational wealth gap is growing. In 2007, that's again, right before the Great Recession, and then there's even more expansion and younger families are pushed below the levels of 1989, whereas older families are still doing better. This is another way to look at that. And so here we have wealth from 2016 compared to the same age family in 1989. If they're above the horizontal line here, that means that if you're older in 19, or excuse me, in 2016, compared to the same age family in 1989, you have more wealth, but younger families, that wasn't the story. So if you compare, say, a 25-year-old in 2016 to a 25-year-old in 1989, they're almost 50% below the wealth that we would expect. So there's huge wealth disparities here, growing wealth gaps, and age 60 appears to be a demarcation point where that trend sort of flips. One final note that I wanted to make sure I got to was on, as Reid said, millennials, the millennial group of the 1980s group is one of the most diverse that we've studied. It's certainly the most diverse up until that point generation. And so we'd be kind of remiss to not talk about race and ethnicity. And so here what I'm showing you on the left, that's income, the income wealth gap for those born in the 1980s, or excuse me, the income gap for those born in the 1980s by race, and then on the right is the wealth gap for those born in the 1980s by race. And so what we see is that just like in the overall population, the income gap is smaller than the wealth gap, but the wealth gap is pretty, pretty massive. And in the overall population, it's roughly the same for the millennials group. So the black-white wealth gap at least. So black families, millennial families, had about 11 cents per every dollar of wealth that white families had. Hispanics were doing better than the overall population numbers, so their gap was 49 cents to every dollar. So still a pretty large gap there, but much smaller than in the overall population, which as Reid said, because this group, Hispanic group has been growing so fast, that is a little bit more hopeful, but the gap remains, right? All right, I think I have just about a minute left, maybe less, so just kind of wrapping up. The millennials, we've seen that they have poor wealth outcomes, poor income as well, but especially wealth tends to be below 34% below our expectations. They're both short-term and long-term causes because of this, and really only time will tell. There are reasons that we can be optimistic. They still have a lot of time. They're still fairly young, but they're getting older, as we mentioned. And so if they are gonna recover, we need to see recovering the next data set, the 2019, which we'll get in the fall. So be on the lookout for that. We'll have an update to this report. Have they recovered any wealth at all? We'll see. Thank you. Thank you, Reid, and New America Foundation for the opportunities to share some facts and some figures from our chapter. Let's see. The other one, the one that's worn off. Because, there we go. So to share some facts and figures from our chapter in the book, we're so excited about the book. And the chapter is the wealth and credit health of young millennials. This is joint work with Caroline Ratcliffe, who's here today, and with Trina Shanks. So as millennials age, and they become a greater share of our workforce like we've heard, their overall financial health matters more and more for our economy. It's increasingly important. So what is their wealth position? We've just heard a lot about it. And is there a natural point that we can intervene in terms of helping with this? I'm also seeing my colleague, Cassie Martincheck, who helped with this chapter here. So great to have you here too. So well, what is wealth? Wealth is what you own minus what you owe. It's your assets minus your debt. And so why are we seeing the generational wealth differences that Anna described? A lower millennial home ownership rate, maybe one explanation, and we're gonna hear a little bit more about that from my colleague. And then a closer look at the debt side of the balance sheet provides some additional insight. So this slide here shows debt for people under age 30 and how it's changed over time. So student or educational loan debt, it clearly stands out. Now what you see is that it's increasing sharply in recent years. Even as other forms of debt, such as vehicle loan debt and credit card debt, they fell after the Great Recession and then they remained relatively low. So for people under age 30 in 1989, student loan debt was a relatively small component of their debt. And that's what you can see on the left side of that graph there. It's pretty close to zero. But by 2016 on the right side of the graph, it was a large component of debt. The average young millennial had nearly $12,000 more in student loans than the average young family had in 1989. So what is the millennial balance sheet? And how does it compare with all families just turning to current time? The most recent data here in 2016. And what we see is that on the asset side, vehicle equity makes up a relatively large share of millennials assets. 27% versus 15% for all families. And if you look at home equity by comparison, it makes up a relatively small share. 6% for young millennials and 21% for all families as shown in the graph here. So this in part reflects that millennials are at a different stage of life than older families. And it also reflects some of the trends that we're seeing. So what about the debt side? On the debt side of the balance sheet, several categories dominate for this younger generation. Specifically, young millennials hold the largest share of their debt in student loans. That's 38%. With car and mortgage loans tied for a distant second, a 21%. In contrast to young families, all families hold the largest share of their debt in mortgage loans, 44%. And the smallest share in student loans, that's at 8%. So this gives us an idea of what's on millennials' minds, student loans and car loans, and how it differs for what might be on the minds of all families. And that is they're gonna be mostly focused on mortgage debt. So let's take a closer look at millennials' credit health, starting with some of the reasons why it's important. Having a subprime credit score is costly. So this figure here shows the expected difference for three common purchases across subprime and prime consumers. A car repair, purchasing a refrigerator, and then buying a car. And a consume with a subprime credit score can expect to pay almost twice as much for a car repair, almost three times as much for a refrigerator, and three times as much for a car loan. So that's nearly $4,000 in interest for that car loan, as compared with a little over 1,000 for somebody with a prime credit score. And we didn't include the difference that a prime versus a subprime consumer will pay on a mortgage because it's off the chart. Consumers with subprime credit could pay nearly $90,000 more when they go to buy their home. And that's if they're able to buy a home, right? Subprime consumers may be excluded from the mainstream credit system. And so by being denied a mortgage, for example, subprime consumers are excluded from one of the most powerful asset building tools that we've traditionally had in the United States. So turning more into that credit health, using 2017 data from a major credit bureau, we find that among people with a credit record, the share of millennials with a subprime credit score increases with age, especially for millennials who live in communities of color. So the first bar in this figure here shows the share of 18 to 20-year-olds with a subprime credit score. The second, the share of 21 to 24-year-olds, and the third, the share of 25 to 29-year-olds with a subprime credit score. And what you see is that, compared with young millennials, the ones 18 to 20, a greater share of those 21 to 24 have subprime credit. The levels are even worse for 25 to 29-year-olds. And this figure also shows large differences for youth who live in communities of color. There, 34% versus in white communities were 26%. That's a gap of 8 percentage points. And the gap doubles to 16 percentage points by age 21 to 24. And that's 47% versus 31%. And it remains consistently large. So not only is the share increasing with age, but it's being exacerbated in communities of color. So importantly, nearly half of millennials, ages 21 to 29, who live in a community of color and have a credit record, have a subprime credit score. So the subcrime credit score leaves them vulnerable to high-cost predatory lending, and it can severely limit their ability to build wealth into their 30s and beyond. In fact, if we look at the average family and their wealth back in the early 1980s, what we see is that racial disparities are already evident about age 30, but that they grow sharply with age. So when people are in their 30s, looking at one cohort here, whites have about three times more wealth than African-Americans. But by the time they reach their 60s, white families have about seven times more wealth than African-Americans. So the racial wealth gap has been growing over time. And if this trend holds true for millennials, then families of color will face increasing economic security and have fewer resources to pursue their dreams and their aspirations. So a common measure of financial distress is reflected in the credit bureau data as the share of people who are unable to pay their debts. So the data clearly reflect that millennials are struggling to pay their student loan debt. Student loan debt and collections increases with age overall and for millennials living in communities of color and for millennials living in majority white communities. So again, we see this pattern that financial distress is increasing with age. And once again, it's worse for millennials living in communities of color where an astonishing 29% of 25 to 29 year olds have a student loan debt and collections. So that's nearly every third person. And that's nearly twice the 17% share for those living in majority white communities. So what are some of the key takeaways from these facts and figures? That this generation is on a very different trajectory for wealth building. And not only are young millennials accumulating less wealth, but their debt holdings look fundamentally different. First interactions with the financial system can set young adults up for success or it can place them in a precarious position for future years. So we need to catch them at age 18 to 20 as they start to interact with the credit system. Young adults debt and collections, their subprime credit and other financial distress increased with age as do the racial gaps. And having a subprime credit score is costly and can hurt young adults' abilities to gain a firm financial footing. And this financial insecurity affects education, it affects social mobility, it affects how much medical debt and collections young people have and much more. So targeting financial health interventions to teens and young adults could be an important step in improving America's long-term financial wellbeing. So you can learn more about this in the book by contacting me by subscribing to Urban Institute's Monthly Opportunity Ownership Initiative. And I'd like to thank funders for their support, especially the Annie Casey Foundation who funded much of this research. And of course, any views and errors are our own. So. Yeah. Thank you. Good morning everyone, I'm Zhang. Thanks for the invitation. So this chapter talks about home ownership and living arrangement among millennials. So as Reed mentioned in his presentation, the home ownership rate of young adults have dropped significantly, especially after the financial crisis. So if you look at the home ownership rate of young adults between age 25 to 34, right now it's around 38%, which is about 7% lower than the home ownership rate in 2000. So millennials right now have about 7 to 8 percentage point lower home ownership rate compared to the baby boomers in Generation X when they were around the same age. Right, so if the millennials between this age group have the same home ownership rate as the prior generation, we will see about 1.3 million more young homeowner households in the current market. Okay, so not only millennials are delaying home ownership rate, a significantly share of millennials are deciding to stay longer with their parents. So this rate has actually kind of increased more than the drop in the home ownership rate. So between 2000 and 2017, the share of young adults living with their parents have increased from 12% to 22%, adding about 5.1 million more young adults living under their parents' roof. And as Reed I think mentioned, this young adults are not even within the home ownership rate calculation because you have to be independent households to be in that calculation. So this rate is not even captured in the decline in the home ownership rate. So there are also significant disparity in home ownership rate and living arrangement across the race and ethnic groups. So the blue line above there is the white home ownership rate. That's the green line. And the blue line underneath is the black home ownership rate. And you see that the gap has increased significantly. I just want to point out here in the graph that, okay, for the blue line, the black home ownership rate, it has declined since 2000. So even during the housing boom period, the young black adult, young adults have not experienced an increase in home ownership rate. Also, I do want to highlight in this graph that if you compare the home ownership rate from 2015 onwards, you see that for all other race ethnic groups, you see a slight uptick. But then for the black young adults, you still see a decline since 2015. So for black young adults, we haven't really seen that the home ownership rate improvement in the recent few years. And also the black young adults are most likely to stay with their parents for a longer period of time. So here you see that since 2015, all lines have increased, but the blue line is at the top suggesting that the black young adults are most likely to stay with their parents followed by the Hispanic young adults, which is in the red line. And also you see that for the Asians and white, the young adults staying with their parents have kind of leveled up since 2015, but for both blacks and Hispanics, we see a continuous increase over time. Okay, so with that, we kind of, in the paper, we kind of discuss whether millennials are different from the prior generations. I'm not sure if you can see the slides very well, but then bear with me, I'll try to explain as clearly as possible. So a lot of media outlets have like talked about, okay millennials, they might have different preferences from the prior generations. So that might be a choice that they're kind of delaying home ownership or staying with their parents for a longer time. But our study and also a lot of studies find that millennials, the desire for home ownership is pretty similar to the prior generation. However, we do find that millennials are preferring to live in downtown or more high cost cities. But then this is not because they wanna live in a more expensive area, it's more because they wanna live in places with greater job opportunity and greater amenities. And these places just happen to have a greater housing cost increase over the past decades. And also millennials are more racially diverse and we know that the people of color have significantly lower home ownership rate. So this is also a contributing factor of lower home ownership rate of millennials. And also the decline in marital rate is also correlated with the decline in home ownership. So next slide shows that there has been a significant decline in the marital rate among millennials. The young adult marital rate in the 1990s were about 60%, now it's about 40%. And we know that from this graph, we show that if you're married, you're more likely to be homeowner. So this is highly related to the fact that millennials have lower home ownership rate. I have two more slides and two minutes to go. So just millennial face greater barrier. With all this, we looked at several factors that are affecting millennials to delay home ownership rate and live with the parents for a longer period of time. So first is employment and income, especially since the financial crisis, the unemployment rate of young adults increased significantly. And although there has been recovery, that means that you have shorter time to save up for down payment. So that has affected young adults to delay home ownership. And second is student debt. As McNamara explained, there has been a significant increase in student debt, which is affecting millennials. It's increasing the debt to income. And also there's a lot of delinquency related to student debt. So that's actually also affecting the credit score of a lot of millennials. And there has been a significant reduction in the housing supply. Right now, the new housing starts in 2018. This 2019 is lower than that of 1960, where the population of the US was only 55% of what it is now. So there has been significant reduction in supply. So that is not only increasing the house prices, but that's also affecting the rent prices to go up. So it's more unaffordable to buy a home and it's more difficult to save for down payment. So because if you're a renter, you're paying more of your income on rent. And finally, the credit has tightened since the crisis. So the median credit score for mortgage origination right now is about 730 to 40, which is about 40% higher than what it was in 2000 when we think it's the period of reasonable lending standard. And as we know that millennials have on average lower credit scores than the older generation, so it's more difficult to access the mortgage market because of the tight credit condition. Finally, I'll briefly talk about the long-term consequences. We kind of thought maybe if millennials stay with their parents for a longer time, it gives them a time to save for down payments because they're not paying for rent. But we find that that's not necessarily the case. When we follow them for after 10 years, we find that the young adults who stayed with their home parents between 25 to 34, they're significantly less likely to be homeowners and former independent households compared to those who moved out of the parents' household earlier in their life. And also, we know that home ownership is a significant wealth-building tool in this country. So this graph shows the home equity at the age 60 and 61 for those who bought their house period before age 25, between 25 to 34, 35 to 44 and 44 over. And this green bar shows that if you buy your home earlier in your life, you have significantly greater housing wealth at the age near retirement. And finally, the thing that is really problematic here is that home ownership transfers from parent to children generation. So if you're a child of a homeowner parent, then you're significantly more likely to be a homeowner yourself. Thank you. Thanks, hi everyone. I'm Genevieve Malford with the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program. I'm gonna make about five minutes worth of discussant remarks, and then I'm gonna, just in the interest of time, I'm gonna open it up to you all. So I'll be thinking of your questions and in about five minutes, I'm gonna throw it to you and I'll facilitate that Q and A until it's time for the next panel. Okay, so thank you so much to read into New America for inviting me to participate today and for inviting my program to contribute to this volume. And so our program, the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program exists to highlight and help drive convergence around solutions to the most critical financial challenges facing American households. So obviously this topic is incredibly important and related to all the things we care about. So the three papers that we just heard do a fantastic job of reporting the top line facts that we need to know about to understand what these challenges are, right? So Anna showed that millennial household wealth is far behind benchmarks set by prior generations and that debt composition is different, less mortgage debt, more student debt, and signatory documented similar points, also pointing out compositional changes in assets and debt and adding to the story with information on credit health, which is incredibly important because it plays a critical role in the price that people pay for credit and therefore their cash flows, what they have to pay on a monthly basis to service that debt. And Zheng showed the decline in home ownership among this cohort. So these are all top line facts that I heard a lot of murmuring and even gasps from the crowd like this is powerful stuff, it's important to see that. So what I'd like to spend my few minutes talking about is what I see as behind these findings, the broader economic context, household cash flows and how those relate to consumer debt because in order to save, invest and build wealth, people need income that routinely exceeds their expenses. So we're seeing the outcomes in these wealth and debt and home ownership data, but I believe what's under that is cash flows. So that's what I'd like to talk about. So my first point is that there are systemic trends behind the millennial wealth gap. So Reid talked this morning about how we're seeing both stagnating and increasingly volatile household incomes, which when you pair that with systematically increasing cost of living, things like housing, childcare and out-of-pocket medical expenses, together those create a cash flow situation that inhibits the development of liquid savings. Liquid savings that could cushion people from routine shocks and without it cause people to have to borrow to smooth their cash flow and pay for basic needs. So that's one really fundamental trend here. Another is the rise of non-loan debt, primarily from unpaid medical bills and also the growing trend toward funding local governments through fines and fees, which when households can't pay those fines and fees have snowballing effects on debt and financial and general life distress. And the third key trend that I will note very briefly is that college costs have risen like crazy, right? So at the same time that a college degree has become increasingly necessary, as we saw from Anna's data, that's how you get wealth in the long run, at the same time, since 2000, aggregate student debt has increased nine times faster than the number of borrowers. So that tells you like, it's not just more people going to college, it's the amount they're borrowing and the cost of college is going crazy and people don't really have a choice about whether or not they're gonna go to college if they wanna be on a firm financial footing, so. My second point, oh, that seems to be more missing the headline there, but anyway, the second point is that we see these larger economic trends playing out in data on household cash flows. So a growing number of Americans don't have a level of income necessary to cover cost of living expenses, which in turn is keeping families from saving, investing, and building wealth for the future. So if routinely positive cash flow is kind of the cornerstone of financial stability, saving, wealth building, security, we don't see it. So according to FINRA's National Financial Capability Study, well under half of all Americans had household income that exceeded expenses in 2018. So to me, that's just the starkest thing. Do people have extra cash flow to put towards savings, cushioning themselves from shocks and investing in mobility? No, most do not. CFPB, National Financial Well-Being Survey, finds that 43% of Americans find it difficult to pay all their bills in a typical month and fully one in three of us have trouble paying for all of our most basic needs like housing, food, and medical care. So this pressure on cash flow then in turn leads to a rise in non-loan debt when people can't pay their medical phone and utility bills and it also leads to having to borrow to make ends meet. So I will not belabor this graph, you've seen them from other people, but basically this cash flow pressure and the rising cost of college are playing out then in the rise of consumer debt. Over the last 15 years, particularly in student loans. And so as my colleague Ida Rademacher and I discuss in our piece in this volume, these trends have serious consequences for financial health and wealth, which we've all seen playing out in the analysis that our three speakers today have presented. So the story goes like this. First, without routinely positive cash flow, building and replenishing liquid savings is a constant struggle. And then without liquid savings, it's very hard to weather shocks and stay on track toward longer term goals or to make wealth building and mobility enhancing investments. And then this is a vicious cycle because if thin margins lead to debt, then that debt servicing adds to the expense side of the cash flow equation making margins even thinner. And that process that I just described is the exact inverse of the process that leads to wealth building. So for young adults, the concern is that all this debt is crowding out asset building, such as in home ownership, retirement and other investing. And in fact, at the Aspen Institute's leadership forum on retirement savings this spring, participants identified debt as the number one challenge to a secure retirement. So I think there's really a broad and growing recognition that this is true. So trying to end with the good news is that I think because all this data is bringing such a clear diagnosis of the problems, that means that we can solve them. So to boost the wealth of this and future generations, we need solutions that are systemic and targeted to the roots of specific problems. So I hope in a discussion we can get a little bit more into that. Our work in consumer debt has identified seven priority areas specifically related to debt, but I think there's work that can be done on any of these trends and underlying things. I'm not gonna go into these details now just to say that we have a very detailed solutions framework specifically looking at consumer debt, addressing kind of four areas that relate to the life cycle of debt from that lack of savings cushion I talked about, all the way to how liabilities can be resolved. And then three of them are product specific because the root causes of some of these debts, like medical debt and student loan debt are so idiosyncratic and they have to do with the way we pay for those things in this country. So lots of details on potential solutions in our report on that, but I'm really looking forward to hearing more of the solutions discussion in other panels in the two subsequent panels. So I will end there and see if folks have questions for these panelists. Thank you. It is on, great. Hi, Paid Miller from Young Invincibles. My question's for Anna. I saw in your presentation you had broken down grad and non-grad, meaning four-year degree or anything before that. Do you have any data about two-year degrees, associate degrees, vocational education and how much of a difference that makes compared to no college education at all? Yeah, thank you for your question. That's a great question and when we get asked frequently because I think in part we just say grads referring to four-year grads, even though of course those with a two-year degree are also grads, the reason we do that break is because if we look at wealth across time and we just, we look at those with a two-year degree or a certificate, they tend to mirror very, very closely and are very close to just those with a high school, terminal high school degree, whereas those with a four-year degree or higher are way above, three times as more as of 2016. And so that's part of the reason we do that break there. Income is a little bit of a different story as it tends to be, so the income outcomes of those with a two-year degree tend to be a little bit higher than those with just a high school, but there's a lot of overlap, right? We're looking at, typically we look at medians or averages and there's a lot of overlap between those like say at the 75th percentile with a two-year degree, there's overlap with the 25th percentile, those with a four-year degree or higher, so there is overlap and that's something we'd like to look at in the future, but again, that's why we make that sort of demarcation point and just the fact that that's such a very diverse group, right, and we don't have any information in our data about the types of schools that people attend or the types of majors that they choose and that I would assume has a very significant relationship with the outcomes of those who have two-year degrees. Just one really quick final thing that I'll say is those with a two-year degree and those who go to college but don't complete, a lot of them are saddled with student loan debt that someone with a four-year degree or higher has much more capability and ease to be able to pay down, so I think that's also very problematic. Okay, well maybe I, oh, here you go. As my generation passes away, the infusion of wealth that we've accumulated and we pass on to the millennials, well that, has that been taken into account as a positive infusion that will somehow skew this negative result? Yeah, I'd be happy to speak a little bit to that. We've done some research looking at kind of large gifts and transfers between generations and what we find is that that is gonna be likely to exacerbate the racial wealth gap and that's because whites are five times more likely to receive a large gift or inheritance than an African American or an Hispanic family and so when you think about what that means in terms of paying for a down payment on a home or helping to pay college tuition, these are building blocks, so part of that could exacerbate the racial wealth gap that we're already seeing. So while folks are thinking, I have one question I'd love to ask all three of you, which is, so all of you have spoken some about some of these underlying trends and I kind of described a framework for thinking about that too, but if each of you could pick one systemic trend that if we solved that one, it would be a major bang toward addressing these problems. I'm not asking what the solution is, feel free to say if you want, but what's the critical trend that you think that if we were able to intervene on it, we'd have a big impact on the household wealth of millennials. It's not the one that we discussed earlier, that you would be asking me about just to clear that up. That's a great question. This isn't necessarily a solution, but one of the things that we see is really just luck of when you were born as really contributing to this generational wealth gap, particularly if you were born in the 1940s, you're golden right at the median, at least at the typical family. You came of age when things were going pretty well and you've been able to accumulate wealth more rapidly than younger generations that we're seeing. It's not a perfect answer, look at the draw, but it has a lot to do with whether or not you're gonna be able to say invest in a market that is going to have your assets appreciate rapidly if you're gonna be able to become that homeowner, if you're gonna have to pay for college at a higher cost than generations past. I think that is not just one thing, but I think it really impacts the trends we're seeing today. Thank you. I guess I'd say wealth inequality and just because it's increasing so much and it's so large, I think we often think about income inequality, but the wealth gaps are so much larger, three times larger than income gaps by one measure and they reflect not just past policy, which is being passed from generation to generation, but they also reflect current policy, which is exacerbating them, and so I'd say wealth isn't just for the wealthy, wealth is where economic opportunity lies. That's that down payment on a home, that's that college education to get ahead, capital to start a small business and a savings cushion to land when 60% of Americans every year, something's gonna go wrong. You're gonna have an income or an expense shock and you need that cushion. So I'd say wealth inequality. I have to highlight one statistics that were really concerning to me when I found out that black college graduates, the millennial black college graduates actually have lower home ownership rate than white high school dropout right now and I think that is really related to the fact that there has been a great increase in college debt, especially among the minority population and they're not getting enough help not only from the, in terms of like getting help from home ownership, they're receiving less from their parents, but then they're also receiving less to pay for college education. So there is this intergenerational transfer of wealth which is exacerbating the racial inequality in wealth. Thank you. So I think that's a perfect segue because I'm actually hearing in tones of what all of you were talking about being born into a generation where the cost of college and the wealth you might have to pay for it are very different than in generations past. So with that, let's turn it over to our student loan panel. Yes. All right, so I'm going to just do a high level overview of my chapter. There's lots of good data points in there that I think you should read and get into them. So first, I think when we're talking about millennials and student debt, we have to really think about some important context and trends that millennials have experienced, especially when experiencing student debt. So since the 1999, 2000 academic year, we've seen a 68% increase in the net price of a four-year degree at a public university. Since that same time, total loans borrowed annually for higher ed has doubled. And not only is it increasing in cost, more people are attending, which is for good reasons, but so we've seen undergraduate enrollment has increased 37% from 2000 to 2010. At the height of the recession, the number has fallen slightly, but it's of course well above the 2000 levels. That's a 73% increase since the 1980s. We've also seen that graduate school enrollment has also increased 36% in that time. It's actually continued to increase, I think at around or rate about 3%. Of course, those are more expensive degrees adding on to the debt. So headlines of course will feature lots of times, students with high debt loads often exceeding six figures, but the typical borrower is not at that level. Undergraduate loans have actually really strict limits that don't allow most graduates to get to that level, to those six-figure levels. So we see here the median graduate in 2016 academic year for bachelor's degree had $27,000 in student loan debt and 14th, a little over 14,000 at the associate degree level. And that's of course an increase since 2003, 2004 academic year, which is about, we've talked about, this is a large time span of a generation that picture can look very different depending on when that person graduated or experienced higher ed. But what it actually happens is that it's the graduate degrees that are often those high dollar student loan borrowers. But only one graduate degree level, it surpasses at the median graduate, $100,000 and that's gonna be our professional doctorate. So our MDs, our JDs, dentists, often people who end up earning six-figure salaries who can afford to repay their debt. Of course, there's exceptions to that, but the highest borrowers on average are not people who are struggling. At the PhD and master's levels, the median debt is about 55,000 and just under 50, respectively. And all of those numbers that I just mentioned include undergraduate debt. But of course, when we're talking about this perspective, we should remember the point I just mentioned is that more people haven't rolled in graduate school, so of course, increasing their debt. But I would say that most of that growth has been at the master's degree level. So when we talk about the cumulative $1.6 trillion debt and paint it as the dire picture of a student debt crisis, I think sometimes that misses just like that six-figure borrower, it misses some really important but smaller significant crises. And so I'm just gonna do that really quickly. These four, what I would consider the really big problems. So first is non-completers. We just, you know, we, students who enroll in school but don't graduate are three times as likely to default on their loans. We have a stratified system of higher ed with varying levels of quality. Many colleges and universities would be labeled as dropout factories if they were a K-12 school. Because they have abysmal graduation rates. On average, a college degree pays off, but only if you graduate. So like I said, they're three times as likely to default if you don't complete. And 65% of those who have defaulted have a loan balance under $10,000. So that's because they enrolled for a short time, borrowed to do so, but left with no degree. So they struggled to repay because when they entered the labor force, they have, you know, debt but no degree or credential to show for it. And they don't see that earnings premium that a college degree affords. And this plays out across the other crises. So of course, as mentioned, when we're talking about wealth gaps, it's really important to remember that we have significant racial wealth gaps stemming from historic racism and the legacy of slavery. And of course that plays out in student debt. Black students are more likely to borrow at a rate nearly 17% points higher than white students. And when they do borrow, they borrow more. And students of color often attend schools with lower graduation rates. Often they are attending community colleges or historically black colleges, universities, which are under-resourced and struggle to provide needed supports for those students. And of course, sometimes that also increases the price of which students are paying and borrowing. But when they do graduate, black students face a discriminatory and racist labor market that pays them less. There's a logical connection, of course, between borrowing more and making less and defaulting on your loans. So research shows as the mortgage rate was really troubling for black graduates, it's, this is worse for me. A black graduate with a bachelor's degree is more likely to default on her loans than a white student who dropped out, which, given what I just said about non-completers, that should be really, really troubling. Next is low-income students. They face many of the same struggles of borrowers of color. And of course, many of them are also borrowers of color. They hire rates to attend college. They borrow more, pointing to the fact that need-based aid hasn't kept up with the rising cost of college. And they also often attend under-resourced community colleges or regional institutions that cost more and aren't able to provide those supports. On average, they're less likely to graduate than their low-income peers. And at some schools, the disparity there is massive. And of course, all of this inhibits them from building wealth, like a college degree should allow them to do. Lastly, something that impacts all of those things is for-profit schools. So the rise of the for-profit higher education sector has contributed significantly to the rise in student debt. They're more expensive, loading students up with more debt, but they're also often in worse quality. So they have significantly lower graduation rates than public or private nonprofit schools. And beyond graduation rates, so while for-profit sector accounts for a 10th of all students, they account for half of all defaults. So it's also just rife with other problems. Beyond poor graduation rates, they have defrauded students by misrepresenting job placement rates. They've been predatory in their recruiting practices, targeting low-income and black students, and as well as veterans. And they've often operated with unstable finances, which put them in a place where they just shut down, leaving students in the lurch. And just as enrollment increased during the Great Recession, broadly, this sector exploded during that time, partially because of online education, but they doubled their undergraduate enrollment during those six years. And that is it. So thank you. I'll turn it over to Brent. Good morning. My name is Brent Cohen. I'm the Executive Director at Generation Progress. Honored to be here today and to talk about the chapter that we co-wrote my colleague, Charlotte Hancock as a co-author, as well as Ben Miller and Colleen Campbell at the Center for American Progress. Generation Progress works with and for young people to advance solutions to the most pressing problems facing our nation and our generations. And we are the only youth-organizing entity nationally that we know of that's housed within a think tank of we're at the Center for American Progress. I want to talk just a little bit about the scope of the issues that we have and then some of the, we laid out four solutions in the paper. And really provided a menu of options for policy makers to think about. Although to be quite frank, having sitting here and listening to just the extent of the wealth gap and the extent of the problems facing millennials as a 35-year-old with more than six figures and student loan debt myself, I don't see how bold solutions such as some form of debt cancellation isn't part of the conversation going forward. And I think it's really critical that whatever type of bold solution there is going forward to be paired with massive solutions to college affordability so that we're not in the same cycle 20 years from now. But we need to address college affordability and also address the ways in which the system has failed our generation over the past 15, 20 years as you've seen here through the myriad of data. So what exactly is the extent of the problem? 43 million Americans collectively owe 1.5 trillion in federal student loan debt. And that debt is especially concentrated among young adults. One in three, roughly, of all adults ages 25 to 34 have some form of student loan debt. So we're talking about one in three people. Our generation was told that going to college is how you achieve the American dream. It is how you ascend into middle class or upper middle class or beyond. It was the pathway we were told. And what we've seen from all of the data today, instead, we've been saddled with hundreds or sometimes thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, which isn't just the impact of having to pay that, but also what you're not able to do because of that home ownership, retirement savings, daycare costs. As millennials in particular, certainly we know people of all ages have children, but as millennials are going into their mid to late 20s, mid to late 30s, many of us have children. And so the matching of childcare costs with student loan debt costs, and in some cases, also elder costs as people take care of families, you're seeing the convergence of these types of debt, all at once, are these types of really basic levels of responsibility on the financial side. And so things like owning a home or saving it for retirement become extremely difficult or impossible. Graduate student debt, I think, is often, we heard a little bit about it today, is often left out of the conversation, but it's also an important element of this broader crisis, particularly acute for people of color. We've heard about the intergenerational wealth gap. We've heard that as incomes, the gap may be less, but the wealth gap remains. Part of the reason is because of the Wesley discussed the racism that is found often in the job market, part of what that means is that people of color need extra levels of degrees for the same level of job, not because they can't perform it, but because they won't be hired. What that means also is that many times borrowers of color have higher level of debt to repay because of those master's degrees and other graduate degrees. And it also prevents wealth accumulation. So whereas white student loan borrowers may have parents who can help them with rent or help them with a down payment on a house, oftentimes because of the history of racism, systemic discrimination in this country, borrowers of color do not have that same level of access. So as I said, we put together a policy of menu options and I should probably start talking about that given my time. We approached the policy options with four main goals in mind, equity, simplicity, broad impact, and meaningful relief. We heard a bit about borrowers who did not complete college and how critical that is, especially knowing that borrowers who did not complete college don't receive the bump in income on the back end but are still saddled with student loan debt. We've heard quite a bit about Black or African-American borrowers showing that the typical Black or African-American borrower had made no progress paying down their loans within 12 years of entering college and nearly half had defaulted. Borrowers were dependent, so these are oftentimes borrowers, students with children. Student parents make up 27% of all undergraduates who default on their federal loans and roughly two thirds are single parents. And then finally, Pell Grant recipients. These were folks who were never supposed to have to borrow to go to college. Pell grants and Pell Grant recipients were supposed to be able to go to college, largely financed by the government, and that simply hasn't happened. And we've seen that roughly 90% of individuals who default within 12 years of entering college received a Pell Grant at some point in life. Simplicity, the best plans in the world are meaningless if people can't access them. Broad impact, we wanna reach as many people as possible so we can have the greatest generational impact possible. And finally, meaningful relief. It doesn't really matter if it doesn't feel like it matters. So those were the broad sort of policy goals we had in mind. Now possible solutions, and again, we laid these out as a menu of options. We did not make a specific recommendation. The first broadly is to forgive all student loan debt. This one's pretty basic, $1.5 trillion. Forgive it, I should say cancel as might even be the preferred term here, cancel the student loan debt for everyone who has it. There are some equity implications but certainly as broad relief, certainly as impactful and meaningful. The second is to forgive a set dollar amount for all borrowers. So the federal government, for example, could forgive up to $10,000, or up to $25,000, or up to 50 or up to $60,000. This means that some people's debt would be entirely wiped out. Particularly for those with lower levels of student debt, 10,000, 15,000, we often know low income borrowers are disproportionately represented with low balances and disproportionately likely to go into default. So from an equity standpoint, even canceling 10 or 15 or $20,000 of debt across the board has huge equity implications and really help out those most at need. Going further up is also particularly important. As we know, black and African American borrowers actually are likely to borrow more money than their white peers and so between $20,000 and $60,000. So there are also equity implications there on the positive side. This is just a very brief chart that sort of lays out as you increase the forgiveness amount from $5,000 to $60,000, an estimate as to how much this canceled debt would quote unquote cost. 207 billion up to 1,065 billion. Far less than the 1.5 trillion, I would point out. Still significant. But as you look at the right column, the percentage of borrowers whose full debt would be eliminated. At a $60,000 cancellation, you're seeing 86% of student loan borrowers having their debt fully canceled. There are the two other options that we discussed in the paper are not about student loan debt cancellation but are around repayment options to tackle excessive interest growth. So the income-based repayment plans were a very positive addition to student loan repayment to really acknowledge the fact that many student loan borrowers aren't able to pay the high levels of student debt and being able to target it and tailor it to 10% of their income was one way to address this. The downside of current income-based repayment plans is that interest continues to accumulate. So as you pay less money or for some people pay $0 per month but are still in repayment, interest is accumulating, meaning your total debt is going up. If you wanna talk about demoralizing, paying as much as you possibly can and seeing your debt go up instead of down is demoralizing. So one of our plans here would eliminate debt accumulation for people who are income-based repayment plans and also lower the number of years from 20 down to 10, excuse me, 15 or 20 depending on undergraduate or graduate loans by which point you would just have the remainder of your debt canceled. And then finally, changing repayment options to provide more regular cancellation. Again, on income-based repayment plans, instead of having to wait 15 or 20 years, say every year, every two years, $2,000 of your debt would be taken off. Meaning as long as you remain in constant repayment, good standing for 12 to 24 months, you are seeing meaningful and immediate relief as opposed to this sort of conceptual relief that doesn't feel like it comes for two decades. So again, a policy menu of options there and look forward to the discussion. Thank you. The imprints for sharing their research. And my name is Sophie Nguyen. I'm the Program Associate at the Hague Education Initiative at New Lanka. And before I give my comment remark on their chapters, I would like to share with you guys a findings come from a major project that we do every year at New Lanka, which is varying degrees our annual surveys into higher education. And one of the striking findings of this year come from the questions when we ask people what they think is the largest sources of consumer debt. The result was that nearly half of Americans think that the largest source of consumer debt is student loan debt. And when we look at it closer by generations, we see that 70% of generation Zs, which is the younger the generations come after millennials think that it's student loan debt and 57% of millennials think of it the same way. And as most of you in the room may have already know, the largest of consumer debt is mortgages, which is about 9.6 trillion dollars right now. And student loan debt comes second, but the number is around 1.6 trillion dollars. So the finding says that the rhetoric that we have been talking about the student loan crisis actually has already taken root in people's mind when they think about accessing college. And I would say that the crisis is less about borrowing, but it's about repaying student loan. And from the paper that Wesley and Cap wrote, we see that the complexity of the repayment system has indeed contributed to the burden of repaying. And for our borrowers, we see that black borrowers borrow who didn't complete their degree and for low, very low income borrowers, they are the ones that experiencing the worst repaying outcome. When we talk about alleviating, how to alleviate the student loan crisis, we need to think of these group of borrowers first. And that's something that I see both chapter for Wesley and Cap agree on, which is targeting the benefit to black borrowers, to borrowers who didn't complete and to very low income borrowers. And over the past year, we have heard from media that with the coming elections, we have heard a lot of proposals as to how we can like solve this problem of the student loan crisis from reforming the repayment system to the variable solutions that Cap mentions that cancel all loans for all students for borrowers. I would say that regardless of the policy solutions, we end up choosing. The first thing we should take it, like consider is that we need to make sure that the policy, the benefit, reach the student who needed the most, the borrowers who needed the most, black borrowers, borrowers with very low balance and very low income borrowers. And last but not least, I would say that we need to make sure those policy solutions is meaningful and have sustainable outcome. In other words, I would say that a loan forgiveness program would not be as meaningful for borrowers if it doesn't come with a comprehensive and regardless approach to fix the repayment system and to strengthen the accountability measures. And that's it. Thank you. Hi, I'm Ray Boshara with the St. Louis Fed. I work with Anna and Reed asked me to moderate the session here and you'll hear more from me in just a minute. So I think we're gonna go straight to the audience given how much time we have and then I have a few questions ready just in case. All right. Yes, can please identify yourself. Hi, my name is Betsy Scarey. I am with the National Women's Law Center and I have a question concerning student loans. So I graduated college with six figures of student loan debt. I am jealous of the people who only have $27,000 in student loans, which is very, very sad. So my question is centered on the FAFSA and then you are given a number when you finish the egregious FAFSA education even completing it is a feat in itself, especially for many students who may not have the resources that I do where I was able to even complete the application. So I'll see a number for expected family contribution. Mine will be nothing. And then when I get my student loan award from my institution, it'll say that my aid, it doesn't cover everything I need it to cover. So there's this huge discrepancy I think in the amount that students' families can afford to pay and then what these financial institutions are awarding them. So I'm wondering if there's a way for institutions to be held accountable. Is there any policy solution that's in play right now? How can we address this serious problem? Thank you. So I'll just offer there are a number of, I think solid policies that are out there that really focus on accountability and reforming on the affordability side of college which is critically important. And as we talk about in the chapter it must be married hand in hand with any real approach to solving the student debt crisis. Solving one without the other is an incomplete approach to this and will have real impacts either for future students or current borrowers. CAP has a plan out that our colleagues on the higher education team at Center for American Progress called Beyond Tuition which is really focused on tying family income not just the tuition costs but to the entire cost of what it is to go to college. I can tell you I too have six figures on student loan. I have scholarships for part of my years plus worked full time and still walked away with that because tuition is only this much of the cost of attending college. And so Beyond Tuition and there are a number of other plans out there some of which have been introduced specifically to address those. Yeah, I'll just add, I mean I remember that I was a Pell student I remember exactly that scenario of like EFC was zero but oh I have a bill of X. I think well one there's definitely policy solutions that have been proposed Senator Alexander's along been a proponent of simplifying the FAFSA and will bring the paper copy out every single time. He just introduced a bill of standalone last week and right now the House Democrats are considering the College of Portability Act which includes simplification. I say yes that's great. It has to of course simplification is good but we also have to make sure that formula is right because that formula is what determines the needed aid. I think that has to be married with increased Pell grants like Pell has not kept up and it has to. I think it should go, it should have a higher maximum it should also more people should qualify. And then I think that's of course married with other real affordability efforts at our state public institutions. Sir, can you hold your mic a little closer? Yeah, can you hear me? Okay, and so thank you for the study it's important. You know, and I, but as I listen I'm just curious and it aside from what the institutions do and how much they're charging and you know that gotta set that aside. When you went through your options I'm curious about a couple things is so I came out of school and I had debt. All the debt repayment stuff was nothing that the person that is acquiring the debt has to do. You're giving him forgiveness. So I didn't have that option. So I joined the army and the army has a debt forgiveness program. So is there a part of the study was if they provide some type of public service that gives them a little skin in the game to say, you know what I need to pay that back. And so that's an option. The other option was, you know, who pays for the 1.5 trillion? As I listened to the democratic debates, you know, somebody's gonna pay for it. It isn't just gonna be wished away. So what, and then what is the thoughtful messaging that says, because you know, people don't wanna pay for other people's debt. I mean, that's just selfless, you know, that's selfishness speaking. But there's no real thoughtful messaging to say, if you do this, this is the impact that it has and it creates a much, it's something bigger than yourself. And we never get to that narrative. It's always, and so I'm just curious about how to get skin in the game and how do you pay it back? Thank you and thank you for your service as well. And maybe pick one of those and address it and follow up after the event and read how much total time do we have left? Just a few more minutes, okay. Sure, so I'll start with the 1.5 trillion. I think, again, there's a policy menu options. One is the full 1.5 trillion. Others are other plans, including for giving up to a set dollar amount, which would have varying actual costs in terms of how much is canceled, excuse me. I'll say, thinking about this in terms of a systemic issue in which we have, as a nation, systemically failed student loan borrowers, there's a reason why people have so much more debt today than they did 20 or 30 years ago. And as we saw in some of the earlier presentations, it's because the rise in the cost of college, the drop in the economy, and this was essentially a gap that then got filled by student loans. So it's not necessarily, and I would argue it is not, in fact, an issue of student loan borrowers taking out too much debt. It's an issue of where millennials were faced with very limited options and student loans were the way to advance and achieve this American dream that we had been promised. And then finally I'll say, we pay other people's debts all the time. We bailed out farmers, perhaps rightfully so. We bailed out Detroit, perhaps rightfully so. Not Detroit the city, but Detroit the automakers, excuse me. We pay people's debts, we pay roads for folks that I never get to drive on. When we have one in three millennials with student loan debt, and we see the home ownership rates at the rate that we do for our generation, when we see the lack of retirement savings that we do for our generation, this is about our overall nation's economy. We are 38% on one of the sides of the working population right now. This isn't just about me, it's about us. And I think the more that we can talk about how this is about us, the better off we'll be. I'll just say, on the public service thing, we actually have a program, Public Service Loan Forgiveness. It has been awful in the implementation. It was a overly complex program that Congress wrote. The department didn't do a great job, so everyone's to blame here. We could fix that and do that. And then I'll just say briefly, I think, while I'm not supportive of massive debt forgiveness, I think the logic, though, is that we invest in the Pell Grant because we believe that people should have access to a higher education because when we know what it does for a person's, their livelihood, their healthier, they live longer, they're just happier, they contribute to the economy, I think. So, again, not for broad forgiveness, but I think an investment higher education is worth it because we should believe in that access for that public good, and I think it also pays off. There's an economic ripple effect, and I have a whole report about that, about how that ripples to the economy. Okay, thank you. I'm getting the signal from Reid, so please hold your question. Maybe we'll be able to get to it in the policy discussion. If I can make just a very brief observation. I really appreciated Sophie's question about equity, if you're gonna do student loan forgiveness, but I was intrigued with the differences on your two lists. So in your four problem areas, there was three areas of overlap between your lists, but you had for-profit colleges on your list, whereas you had people with dependents on yours, and I'm wondering, I'd just love to see a reconciliation of those two lists as we think about equity for any kind of student loan forgiveness program, because I think it's a critical question. Generation of progress, we spend a tremendous amount of time working on four-profit colleges, and there's tons of overlap in terms of the borrowers who go to a four-profit college and some of the other demographic groups. Right, I mean, they're in that group, right. And students with dependents, that's a big account for 24% of students, so they're in everything. I just think it's the right question, because the concern I have is that it will result in just more wealth accumulation for families who could probably afford to pay the loans off anyway. So I really appreciate that important point. I would just like to thank our panel here for their great work. No stress. There was a lot of information delivered today from up here, and believe it or not, there's more in the book. There's a lot of material, a lot of facts, and analysis, and even policy discussion. So, invite you to dig in online, take a copy with you on your way out. Anyone listening, watching us online, it's all available on the New America website with interactive tables and charts even. And yeah, we're gonna have a policy discussion here. I think one of the reasons why wealth matters, just looking at some of the implications, is that we've had a shift of responsibility of who's handling the risk in society. And increasingly over the last 20 years, it's been individual families and households that are responsible for managing their own retirement savings, putting their children to school, investing in education, healthcare costs. And so that risk shift placed a lot of burden on these households, and if the resources aren't there, as we've seen for this kind of rising cohort, well, the implications are severe, and it raises a lot of questions about generational fairness and equity and reciprocity, and if the prime generation that's working and raising families feels like they don't have the resources to meet their responsibilities, well, it's gonna challenge a lot of assumptions about how the society is all put together. So in that sense, we're all in this together, and it's a collective endeavor. And so that's one of the things I wanted to open with for policy remarks. We're gonna hear from Liz Hipple and Ray Bechara with their comments. In the final chapter of the book, does have kind of a list, a menu of ideas about a policy response at scale to try to respond. And it's divided up into kind of the categories of what do we do for the current cohort that is realizing these financial pressures and very important to deal with the millennial balance sheet? How do we repair the balance sheet going forward? And I think it makes sense, given the evidence we've seen today and in the book, that a large scale response is needed, and whether it is some loan cancellation or some other kinds of opportunities that are created or changes in tax policy. And then there's another set of ideas that are about what do we do with the next generation coming up? How do we fix the systems? How do we create these new pathways to progress so people can move on these, pathway upward mobility and don't find themselves in the same kind of situation? So I invite you to look at the book. There's some ideas about housing. There's some ideas about retirement security savings and also pathways forward about maybe some new opportunities to create some leveraging shared ownership among the rising generation. So that's kind of what I wanted to open with my frame, but Liz, I'd like to hear your remarks. Then we'll hear from Ray and then we can have a discussion to close out the day. Yeah, sure. So my name is Liz Hipple. I'm senior policy advisor at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, where I lead our work on economic mobility. And so my perspective on the political and policy salience of the Millino-Milk Gap is very much influenced by that perspective that it's economic resources don't just matter for today and people's outcomes today also has implications for intergenerational outcomes in the future. And I think a lot of the comments today that we've already heard in earlier panels really illustrates this point. But I would kind of put the policy implications of the Millino-Milk Gap into a couple of buckets. One is that it means that there's less financial resources for investment in tomorrow's generation. So it's not just an issue for millennials ourselves that we have less wealth than prior generations. It also matters for our kids and their outcomes. We know that financial resources, both income and wealth have really important implications for educational attainment, for educational completion and in turn in earnings in the future. And so if families today have less money to invest in their kids' education and skills acquisition that's gonna have implications for their kids' earnings potential in the future. I think this also gets to one of the themes that we've heard today too of the issue of luck of the draw. We can't build policy on luck of the draw. And if folks today have, if you have less income yourself to save out of, whether that's for down payment for a house or whether that's for your kids' future education, that's gonna mean that the importance of your parents' wealth and whether they're able to kick in anything to help you make those investments for yourself and your kids in the future are gonna take on a larger and more disproportionate impact. And that has real equity implications, some of which we've already talked about today. That means that racial wealth gap is even more exacerbated going forward because we know that black Americans were systematically shut out of the housing market in the United States. And so they have less housing wealth themselves to be able to then draw on to help their kids go to college or put a down payment on their own house. And then I think the other issue when it comes to exacerbating existing economic and racial inequalities too, there was an excellent question from the audience earlier about the implications of, yes, there is an aging baby boomer population with as we saw from Anna's presentation a tremendous amount of wealth and that wealth being passed along to those lucky millennials who happened to be their kids. Again, we get back to this issue of you just have luck of the draw. And I think this is not just like runs counter to basic fairness and equity concerns. I think it also has real political implications. We already I think are struggling with the country to kind of understand and find a shared sense of responsibility for one another. And if folks are seeing outcomes being increasingly dictated by who was lucky enough to have a parent who was able to send them to college or help them buy a house, that's gonna really further exacerbate that lack of social and political cohesion. And the final policy implication that I'll note too is this also has implications for our overall economic growth going forward. If folks have less money to be able to save and invest in themselves, they have lower potential spending in the future. They have less money to invest in their kids, as I've already mentioned. And we also are foreclosing the opportunity for example, the smart, bright kid who has a really great idea and isn't able to actually get that idea off the ground and launch the next Google because they themselves don't come from a background that gives them the startup capital that they need. And that means that our economy is missing out on a lot of great opportunities and ideas that could really propel new innovation and dynamic economic growth. Thank you. Reid, congratulations on the book. And it's great to be sharing a stage with you after working with you for 14 years. I had the good fortune of hiring Reid right out of the White House. One of my first hires, one of the best hires. And it's great to be back. So thank you and congrats to all the authors as well. Reid did invite me to contribute to the policy chapter and we put our heads and our pens together over the summer. Unfortunately, my name didn't end up on the chapter because the Fed has a hard time getting policy recommendations out the door, understandably, that's part of the deal when you work at the Fed. And any of your views expressed today do not reflect the title of your position. Well, I was gonna get to that, yes. So yeah, my views definitely don't necessarily reflect the views of the Fed and are my own views. But I am gonna highlight areas where I think there's alignment between what the Fed would recommend based on the research that we've done and what Reid ultimately included in the chapter. So I kind of two buckets here. What do we do for current millennials and then what do we do for future generations is the way I'm thinking about it. And so I would just also point out that at the Fed, Anna and I and our colleagues study the racial wealth gap, educational wealth gap and the millennial wealth gap. I think these recommendations would actually impact all three, not just the millennial wealth gap. So these are important regardless of what gap we're trying to take on. So I think for current generations, let me just mention five things very briefly. I don't need to cover them since they were covered before. Very much picking up on Genevieve's excellent research at the Bureau and now at Aspen, cash reserves are critical. There's four or five bodies of research suggesting that sufficient cash flow, liquidity is critical not only for resilience but for upward economic mobility. And these cash shortfalls are very real especially for a generation working in a gig volatile economy with flat wages. So very much endorse efforts to do that. The second is something that picks up from Neil Irwin's, the New York Times columnist, new book called How to Win. And it's really about lifelong learning but it's about what we should be focused on in lifelong learning which is this idea of sort of adaptability throughout the life course. The job you need to prepare for is probably one that may not even exist. And that could be changing and could be a constant, I'm sorry, throughout your life. And so team-based work is really important. And so we have to think about preparing ourselves for adaptability more than a particular job. And I would just note that in other work, we've looked at the 529 College Savings Platform as actually an ideal vehicle. For that it's a tool through which people could make investments in somebody's lifelong learning and skills development. The third, really, I mean the rising cost of college and reliance on student loans, I don't think I need to say anything more than that other than to highlight research that Anna did showing that student loans do in fact impact wealth premiums going forward, in particular for people of color. So there are real consequences to student loans among the many other things that folks talked about. Fourth, something that June mentioned in her presentation, I think we really have to think hard about housing affordability and past to sustainable home ownership. This is critical throughout the country. People do want to be homeowners, they can't afford it for a whole range of reasons. So it's both affordability for people who aren't ready to own homes, but then sustainable home ownership for those who are. And then finally, this one's a little more out of the box I guess. I think we have to think of new sources of income and wealth and new sources of ownership going forward. I think great work at Aspen where I'm a fellow has found that the historic link between work and wealth has been broken. You can't assume that earned income is sufficient to build enough savings and wealth for resilience and mobility. So what do you do in that world, right? What do you do in that world? I mean we had this idea in the US which is not necessarily true in other countries that you can accumulate enough wealth privately that you can kinda get by without the state necessarily. And so we've created a, you know, we have a country where you have to have the ability to accumulate quite a bit of private wealth in order to manage your lives and your kids' lives. Well if that world isn't necessarily true for probably the majority of American sound, certainly for millennials, we have to think very creatively about other sources of ownership and income. And so for some people that might be the basic income work that many folks talk about for the work that I'm interested in and doing through Aspen is thinking about what are some other assets that could be monetized, claimed as an asset, monetized, and then used as a source of wealth. So organized around table for next month, you know, trying to bring together folks around the idea of the data dividend. You know, could you claim your own data as an asset and then be paid for it? Peter Barnes has talked about, you know, the carbon absorption capacity of the sky. You know, there's a whole range of assets that if we just claim them as public assets could be a source of revenue and actually help with things like climate change, data privacy, data ownership. So I'm really, really interested in this, you know, ESOPs are another part of this shared equity home ownership, which Sigma Mary has done some great work on in Caroline. So anyway, the point is we have to get out of this box that earned income is simply enough. So let me just close with two very brief thoughts on future generations. You know, I think, of course, the work of Chetty is really important, but what the big takeaway there is the investments that happen locally really matter a lot. So if you really want to affect the trajectory of a kid's life, make investments in place. And more so necessarily than the national investments, although those are really important too. And then finally, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about early education and early assets. Huge fan of Baby Bunch, child development accounts, put 20 years into that. Reid and I worked on some bills here in Congress back in the day. They're happening all over the state. And I don't think there's a better way to address equity, inclusion, savings, financial inclusion than, you know, starting each kid fresh with some savings and assets. So, yeah, and let me just close with an observation that Phil Longman made, former colleague. He said that through most of American history, the gap between the generations was growing and large. Large and growing, but for really good reasons is because each generation was doing better than the last. Starting in about the 70s, the gap continued to grow between the generations, but for the opposite reason is because kids are doing worse, right, than their parents. So it always struck me as really profound. So I think the wealth gap is not only a threat to the American dream. It really is, it's a threat to the social contract too. And that's my final point, and it's just picking up on something Reid said. The social contract, when it was largely put in place in the New Deal and the Great Society, was premised on the idea that we would have rising productivity, broad wealth distribution, and sharing prosperity so that future generations could in fact afford to pay for previous generations retirement and security. Well, my goodness, if the future generations aren't prosperous anymore, then how does the social contract even work, right? So I really do think this is a question of generational equity, fairness, and sustainability, as Liz talked about. So I'm in favor of some kind of a, like a generational adjustment in the social contract. And I would have to think hard about how that would work, but I think we have to think along those lines. Thank you. Thank you. Some of those ideas are woven into the last policy chapter and that challenge of how do you readjust the generational, the deal and what the fairness looks like with if there's not going to be kind of growing prosperity, who's gonna handle that responsibility. And something that we haven't talked about today, but it's in the last chapter, is the essential need of a program like Social Security, which is there as a backstop at the end for other families experiencing vulnerability throughout the life and how that's gonna need to be not only supported, but probably expanded upon. So yeah, I'm definitely interested in some comments and feedback of the room, since there was a lot of information today. So if there are questions or comments, we'll move the mic around. I'll also say that reinforcing housing as this other concept that we've talked about today, one of the slides that Jung presented that maybe you can see better online is to show that the importance of home ownership essentially to predicting future wealth outcomes and trajectory and when that even, when it doesn't occur, a real divide, but if it occurs later or delayed or with more leverage, the impact of undermining wealth long-term is very important. So therefore, what are the alternatives? How do we jumpstart responsible home ownership? What are some of the alternatives to kind of this binary rent-to-own? And I think that there's some ideas about how to create some other space, shared equity, home ownership, cooperatives. And then as Ray talked about, and there's more in the paper about these ideas and I think we wanna do some more work on them, is yeah, what are some other alternative things that can be leveraged? Other sources of new income, new wealth that we haven't tapped yet. I mean, Alaska has a permanent fund where they give a dividend to all their citizens based upon the mining of their resources. So that's something that I think that we need to put on the table as big ideas. Okay, let's start here. We only have a few minutes left, but yeah, let's flag me if you have a comment. Thank you. Connie Malone, a retired member of the New York State Union of Teachers. In all of this discussion, I have to refer back to Brent Cohen and the extreme veracity, the wonderful way you expressed what was promised your generation and what has not been delivered. The gig economy, even if you have a professional degree, you came out with six-figure loan and you were okay with that because you expected that you would be able to pay that back because after all, if you could get a six-figure loan, then you were in a category that would be able to pay that loan back. No, no, it was a big, big lie. And now these kids who are holding back on having kids, and I hate to sound like a cattle breeder, but they're the ones who have the best gene pool, okay, and they're the ones not having the kids because they can't afford them are in a gig economy. So where do any of you stand, and have you addressed the importance of supporting the rebuilding of unions to support the rebuilding of the United States? Yeah, thank you. That actually isn't in the final chapter, but I have written about that in other venues and I think the decline of being able to have kind of collective bargaining has been a big driver in growing inequality in the country. So it is something. And I want to give a shout out. I personally do not work on unions or research into monopsy, but I have a colleague, Kate Bong, at Equitable Growth who does amazing research on both the decline of workers' bargaining power and also more generally, the rise of monopsynistic markets where there's only one employer and so that can have not literally one employer, but limited number of employers and so that drives down your options as a worker and depresses wages. So you should check out Kate's research on this, yeah. There was an underbelly of some of this work is also about the pressure it puts on families and the challenges of having children and the expense of that and how just when families are really feeling the most financial pressures, when they have children is also when they're in the kind of prime of their work years and it's where we need to think harder about some other ways of supporting them so that it's not as a big of a sacrifice. I would just add that Genevieve pointed out the systemic nature of these inequalities and the institutional nature of it. This is one of the important institutions in stemming that rising inequality. Any final other questions here? Okay, in the back. Hi, Robert Schrader with International Investor. I came in late so forgive me if you've covered this. I don't see it. I just picked up a copy of the report. There's going to be a vast transfer of wealth, too, from the older generation to this younger generation. That's, I imagine, is going to exacerbate the wealth gap. You've already discussed this, I guess? Well, it was raised. I mean, I think that there is a lot of wealth that's accumulating. I wonder if the Federal Reserve or anyone has done research on that. Can you guide me there? Yeah, I mean, Sigmund Mary had some comments about it. I mean, clearly there's wealth accumulating into the oldest households, and we know you can't take it with you. So what's going to happen? And we think it's going to increase inequality in terms of how it's distributed. It's largely white, well-educated older households that have the wealth in the first place and the ones that are in a position to transfer the wealth. So I think you're right, it's likely to exacerbate wealth inequality. Very much so. I just got a comment on this, because it's not just, you already see it in terms of education, clearly. The parents who can afford to step up and help their children makes an immense difference. But when that transfer really takes place in the coming 10, 20 years, you're gonna see those who come from well-to-do families sitting in a very nice position, and those who aren't are going to be worse off than ever before. So I think you're gonna see extreme differences here. I mean, it is true and it is worrisome, but I'd also say that most wealth transfers happen throughout life, not at the end of life. And so we have to be as concerned about those transfers, like paying for a home or an education. That's actually where most wealth transfers happen, although we should be concerned about those transfers as well. And also, it is certainly a moment for public policy. I mean, to step in and change how we do kind of tax and distribute those resources. So certainly something to add. I just add on to Ray's point about the influence of wealth throughout one's life course. Sociologists at the University of Michigan, Fabian Pfeffer has a really great phrase for this, which is that the end of life transfer is just the cherry on top of a lifetime of wealth, both buying a lot of advantage. It buys your school district, it buys your college education, but it also subtly influences people's decision-making process throughout their life. There's a big difference between contemplating job X versus job Y. One might be really secure, but lower paying. One might offer a lot of great opportunity, but be riskier. Depending on what kind of family background you're coming from, you're gonna have a very different risk calculation about what life path it makes sense to take, knowing that you have that safety net to fall back on versus you don't. And so absolutely agree that when end of life transfers happen, that especially given the quantity, it will be profound. I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that wealth and equality plays out throughout life. Yeah. But just a final comment on that. We talked to a lot of financial advisors, and I'll tell you how extreme their point of view is. They look for the last surviving parent of a wealthy household to seek out the children who are about to get that wealth. Because during the course of that lifetime, the parents might well be saying, we don't wanna spoil our children, we'll give them what's necessary, but we're gonna hold back the substantial portion of our wealth. When that second parent dies, it's a big difference suddenly in that life of the millennial in this case. Yeah, thank you. All right, well, this was a big topic. There's a lot of information in the report that we covered. And yeah, please dig in, tell your friends certainly interested in any feedback along the way. And thanks for your time and engagement today. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah.