Coronavirus has posed greater health risks to older people than to younger people. According to the CDC, coronavirus hasn’t killed anyone under 30 in our state.
But the pandemic has had greater economic impacts on young adults. According to research from the New York Federal Reserve, young adults have seen more job losses than older workers:
Young workers, like every other demographic slice, have clawed back a lot of those job losses since the pandemic drove us into recession, but employment among the under-30 workforce as of December was still 6% below its pre-pandemic levels, while the 30-49 set was only down 4% and the 50+ set remained down 5%.
That higher pandemic unemployment correlates with higher rates of young adults living with parents. The pandemic is also associated with a 13.1% drop in young adults starting college, because of a combination of financial uncertainty and perhaps waiting until it’s safe to go back to the traditional face-to-face classes that many people prefer (although one recent survey finds that 74% of students in online programs say their courses are at least as good as on-campus learning… so try it, you’ll like it?).
So even if young adults haven’t gotten physically sick, the pandemic could leave them with lingering, long-term economic aches and pains from this early obstruction of their education and earning power. We thus need to invest now in higher education to help students make up for their pandemic-delayed learning without pushing them into a deeper financial hole. We need to work on sharing the wealth that the one-percenters have continued to rake in during the pandemic to raise wages for young workers so they can make up for the valuable early wages they lost and rebuild the foundations of their interest-accruing nest-eggs and put themselves in better positions to get of Mom and Dad’s hair, buy their own homes, and someday pay for their kids’ college.
The pandemic is real, and it is affecting everyone. We need good education and economic policy as much as we need smart public health policy to cure our coronavirus ills.