How the generations stack up financially

By many measures, Generation Z is doing well.

Compared with their parents at this age, young adults are more likely to have a college degree and work full time — particularly women, who are not only achieving increasing levels of education but also earning more.   

However, Gen Z adults are also less likely to own a home, be married or have children.

Today’s young adults are reaching those key milestones later than their parents did in the early 1990s, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. Pew surveyed about 1,500 adults between the ages of 18 and 34 and more than 3,000 parents of adult children. Gen Z is generally defined as those born between 1996 and 2012, including a cohort of teens and tweens.

Although young adults today are much more likely than their parents to have a four-year college degree, work full time and have higher wages than their parents did 30 years ago, they are also more likely to have outstanding student loans, Pew found.

Not only is it common to carry education debt, but those balances have soared, the report also said, primarily as a result of the rising cost of college.

“They [Gen Zers] are more highly educated but they are taking on so much more debt, that is making it harder,” said Kim Parker, Pew’s director of social trends research.

Most people with student loans say they’ve had to delay one or more key life milestones because of their debt, other studies also show.

“Student loan debt prevents family formation, it prevents people from making decisions about their life, about purchasing a home, about buying their first car, about getting married, about having children,” Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, previously told CNBC.

But that’s not the whole story.

In addition to hefty student loan balances, inflation’s recent runup caused rent and housing prices to soar.

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