Student loans are on the minds of Utah Millennials, along with finding a job to pay off that debt. The latest Utah Foundation study comparing attitudes about work came out Thursday.
That debt is setting the generation, born from 1981 through the early 2000’s, apart from all earlier generations. Christopher Collard is a research analyst with the Utah Foundation. He says this group is definitely worried about it.
“For example Utah’s average debt level nearly doubled since 2006 and so I mean,” says Collard, “that’s something that’s concerning. And Utah’s actually had some of the highest increases in that student level of debt.”
Collard says the good news is Utah Millennials seem more content than their national peers about their present incomes.
“So that could be an aspect of Utah’s thriving economy and it could also just be an aspect of Utahns being more positive about their current level of wages and more confident about their future possibilities,” says Collard.
He says even with Millennial’s concerns about student loan debt, the study found that increased earnings are starting to show up for those who invested in their education. The Utah Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research group. The report released Thursday is the second in a series of four. It’s titled “Millennials and Boomers: How Utah’s Generations Compared to Each Other and the Nation”.
