When I was 21 years old, I packed my bags and left my childhood home for the spare bedroom of a stranger’s townhouse in Washington, DC, a city where I had no family, few friends, and limited professional connections. This was hardly a safe decision–I would be earning barely above the minimum wage at an internship with no guarantee of a job offer, and forgoing an opportunity to ease into the job market from the comfort of my parents’ home, where I would have had both a financial safety net and an existing network of friends.
Four years later, this risky decision stands as one of the best of my life. D.C. was unfamiliar territory, but it was–and is–where the job market was thriving, particularly in the field I wanted to pursue. Through a lot of hard work, calculated risk-taking, and some good luck, I’ve risen from a low-wage intern to the director of communications at a nonprofit, and moved on from that rented bedroom to the condo I recently purchased with my wife. Did I know things would turn out this way? No–but none of this would have happened if I didn’t have the ambition to leave home for D.C. in the first place.
My story is hardly unique–from the time of the first English settlers, young Americans have moved from coast to coast in search of work and economic opportunity. That’s why it’s so troubling to see that, despite technology bringing the world closer, young people today are less likely to relocate than at any other time since the end of World War II. In 2013, just 20 percent of Millennials age 25-34 reporting moving, a decline of more than a third from the midcentury peak.
Ryan Yang, a 23-year-old from New York, is emblematic of this troubling trend. The 2013 graduate was offered a job in a research laboratory shortly after finishing college, but turned it down, refusing to move a mere 50 miles to obtain gainful employment. A year later, Yang–like so many of his peers–remains unemployed and living at home.
If the job market for recent college graduates were booming nationally, these types of decisions to stay home might make sense. But as we all know, job prospects for recent grads are still historically dismal, with the class of 2013’s unemployment rate at 11 percent, and underemployment rates as high as 44 percent. At a time when jobs are harder to come by, young people are being less proactive than ever in searching for work.
We’re refusing to leave the comforts of home at a time when the comfortable hometown jobs our parents and grandparents graduated into are drying up. The job growth America has experienced during its slow, weary recovery has been uneven–a handful of major metropolitan areas and Sun Belt states are on the rise, while many small towns and northern industrial states continue to decline. (My home state of Pennsylvania, for example, ranked 48th in job growth last year.)
In a time of scarcity, a proactive mindset is more important than ever, but Millennials are tacking in the opposite direction. Whether due to risk-aversion, fear of failure, or a broader generational reluctance to tackle the challenges of adulthood, today’s young people seem to lack the thirst that led previous generations to success.
