Troubling unemployment. Soaring debt. Global turmoil. To many, it looks like a grim future.
But the dour economy didn't faze Kim Davis, 22, who graduated from UCLA in June and confidently predicted a "really bright future" for herself and her classmates.
Davis was glowing on graduation day, like so many young adults around her. Researchers say such optimism is especially striking among young adults of her generation, often dubbed millennials, as they weather some of the worst financial conditions in decades.
Though young adults are less upbeat than they were around the turn of the millennium, their hopes remain high.
"It's hard to imagine a time when there was this level of optimism among a group so hard hit by economic conditions," said Kim Parker, associate director of the Pew Research Center's Social and Demographic Trends project. "In the face of the Great Recession, it's pretty phenomenal."
As joblessness among young adults hit record highs, a whopping 88% of people ages 18 to 34 said they had enough money or would have enough in the future to meet their long-term financial goals, Pew found last year.
Even among those who said they were unemployed and financially strapped, 75% said they would someday have enough money. Overall, nearly three out of four believed they would achieve their goals in life — or already had — which was slightly more than among older adults.
Their elders are less hopeful for them. Fifty-four percent of Americans over the age of 55 thought young people today were unlikely to have a better life than their parents, compared with 42% of those ages 18 to 34, Gallup found in a poll six months ago.
Over the last two decades, people in their 50s and 60s have tended to be less upbeat about the chances of their children living as well as they do, according to data from the General Social Survey, a long-running study funded by the National Science Foundation.
But this optimism gap had widened, last year becoming bigger than ever in polls stretching back to 1994. Gallup and Pew surveys reveal similar patterns.
Michelle Woody, 25, said her worried parents prodded her to take a temporary job as she neared graduation at Cal State Long Beach.
"They were in the mind-set of, 'Take any job that pays, because there won't be any jobs at all,'" Woody said. But she thought, "Why settle? Those positions would suck the life out of me." She held out, waiting for a job that she preferred at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
Experts say millennials' upbeat attitude sets them apart from the baby boomers, born in the aftermath of World War II, who hit adulthood during the tumult and disillusionment of the 1960s and '70s. Pew earlier dubbed boomers "the Gloomiest Generation" because they long have long rated their lives more poorly than do older adults.
In several surveys, millennial optimism also appears to outpace Generation X, born in the late 1960s and 19'70s, who saw divorce surge and the culture wars explode.
Millennials, born in the '80s and early '90s, watched the world go digital and the World Trade Center towers fall. They are more likely to have gone to college, less likely to have gone to war and less likely to have wed than their elders were at the same age, Pew analyses show.
Fewer say they belong to a particular faith, yet they are about as likely to pray as were twentysomethings in the '80s and '90s. Tattoos and piercings are more common among them; owning a gun is less so. Most have slept next to their cellphones.
Their optimism is linked, in part, to attitudes instilled by parents and teachers who told them they could do anything, researchers say.
Confidence "has been hard-wired into their DNA," said Sharalyn Hartwell, executive director of Magid Generational Strategies, a unit of the Frank N. Magid Associates consulting firm. "It's not that they're young and dumb. They were taught, 'Believe in yourselves.'''
More educated than their elders at the same age, many feel they are actually in better shape than their parents were at this point in their lives, the General Social Survey shows.
Among them is Mario Nuñez, who lives with his family and works in the San Fernando Valley to save money for college. The words of his father push him forward.
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