Poverty at Age 30 Across Birth Cohorts: Changing Returns to Education and Employment

This brief compares poverty rates at age 30 across birth cohorts and considers mechanisms that might explain observed differences, including policy expansions and changing returns to education and employment. We ask how differences in the prevalence of correlates of poverty and changes in risk-level associated with those same correlates explain the socioeconomic position of Millennials relative to earlier cohorts at age 30. We rely primarily on estimates of pre-tax/pre-transfer poverty rates measured using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), assessing how well the labor market delivered 30-year-olds from different cohorts out of poverty. Beyond that, we consider the role of safety net programs in lifting people out of poverty and how that has changed across cohorts. Broadly, our results suggest that despite the gains made by Millennials, particularly with regard to educational attainment and labor force participation, they face higher rates of pre-tax/transfer poverty than earlier-born cohorts. This increase is, in part, explained by the diminishing returns to a high school degree or its equivalent and to part-time work in terms of reducing the risk of poverty. Despite these facts, they are no more likely to be in poverty at age 30 than these earlier cohorts, and this is driven by policy expansions that make up for income declines among the lowest income members of this more recent cohort.