It’s graduation season, a time for celebration and optimism for the country’s newly minted college-educated young adults. It’s time to grab that diploma and chase that dream, to move into that first big-city apartment or head cross-country to follow your passion. It’s a standard part of the country’s narrative and mythology.
It’s also one of the aspects of the American dream that’s become less common for today’s young adults. In the U.S., people are staying put like never before.
According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans moving over a one-year period fell to an all-time low of 11.2 percent last year (domestic migration shrunk in half since 1965). The drop is particularly prevalent among millennials. New survey data from the Pew Research Center found that 25- to 35-year-olds are relocating at much lower rates than the previous generation. Last year, 20 percent of millennials moved sometime in the last year. When older generations were the same age as millennials now, they moved at higher rates: Gen X was at 26 percent, as was the generation between 1925 and 1942.