Unemployment among Millennials is still high and college isn’t getting any cheaper.

The editors of the New York Post recently examined the issue.

Overpaying for college

If millennials today think transitioning out of their parents’ basements and into adulthood is difficult, wait until they see new data from the Census Bureau. It reports that one in five adults between the ages of 18 and 34 now live in poverty.
These Census reports are consistent with the under- or unemployment of millennials.

But it doesn’t get to the fundamental cause of their distress, which is this: Millennials are carrying too much debt from loans that went to pay for college degrees that, in the real world, aren’t worth that much.

Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity notes that the poverty millennnials face today isn’t as severe as the “the sort of hard-core poverty where you have significant malnourishment.”

Rather, it’s a new form of dependency, the sort that relies on help from parents as college grads transition into jobs that don’t really require a college degree.

As Vedder explains, this is because “we turn out so darn many college grads, which also hurts the high schoolers.” In other words, jobs such as bartending and Starbucks barista-ing are being taken over by those with college degrees.

Yes, compared to the same age group in 1980, 1990 and 2000, the Census says the number of millennials in poverty has increased by 20 percent.