Millennials and Moral Panic in the United States and beyond

Introduction

Despite a large volume of discussion around millennials and some unique patterns of their social behaviors, there is no clear consensus as to who constitutes the millennial generation. Yet, according to a recent report by Pew Research Center (2019), millennials can be defined as those who were born between 1981 and 1996, or those of ages 23 to 38 in 2019 in the United States. Culturally, individuals who were born during this period were heavily influenced by an explosion of broadband Internet access and use. Politically, they were shocked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and grew up influenced by the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. They also witnessed the first African American elected as president as teenagers or young adults in 2008.

Demographically speaking, millennials are also distinctive from their earlier generations. Compared to their previous generations, they are well educated with higher levels of educational attainment on average. They have been exposed to greater levels of racial/ethnic and gender diversity and are more accepting of social minorities. However, they have faced much precarity when entering the labor force, as a result of the economic recession in 2008 (Kalleberg 2009, 2011). In addition, despite wide connections to social media, millennials tend to have fewer friends and they are more prone to stay unmarried, compared to previous generations (Martin, Astone, and Peters 2014; Pew Research Center 2018).

In response to this emerging generation, this paper attempts to look at millennials in three different contexts. First, we discuss what social conditions millennials have faced as they are currently well into young and mid adulthood, and how they have responded differently from the previous generations, specifically in terms of crime and social justice. Then, we turn our attention to the classroom setting in higher education institutions to explore ways to better educate our future generations. Finally, because millennials in South Korea (hereafter Korea) have experienced transitions to adulthood in a more extreme way, we discuss several important issues related to family formation in Korea, which may be relevant to other societies over the next few years. We hope that this paper provides a better understanding about millennials, and an opportunity to think of ways for moving forward.

Race and Crime for Millennials

When Elvis Presley gyrated his hips in the late 1950s to Baby Boomers, it led to a moral panic by parents who were part of the G.I. and Silent Generation. They felt that his dancing was provocative and insinuated sexual activity (Thiel-Stern 2014). He demonstrated a mixing of the races by a white performer singing and dancing to black music (Hess 2005). Was the racialized generational perception of deviance which Elvis projected a result of his display of black music, or of his later drug use that eventually led to his death? His dancing and Rock N Roll persona paralleled a generational difference in understanding of lyrics that brought policing to music concerts (Wertheimer 1993). For millennials, they are caught up in the current racial disparity we see in our criminal justice system (Cohn and Caumont 2016). As the use of social media evolves and its relationship to drug use, we continue to have conversations about the issue of moral panic (Thanki and Frederick 2016).

Elvis’s hips illustrate an example of a moral panic and crusade in the 1950s that can be understood using a labeling approach to deviant behavior (Schur 1980). Nachman Ben-Yehuda (1986) developed labeling theory to explain how social control amplifies deviance. Today, millennials are the contrast between Generation X and Baby Boomers (Sirias, Karp, and Brotherton 2007). For example, millennials are less likely to engage in criminal activity such as robbery and murder than their parents (Tyson 2015). However, millennials have a greater awareness about and exposure to drug use than previous generations. Currently, medical marijuana is legal in 33 states in the United States, and public concern for the misuse of alcohol, illegal drugs, and prescribed medication has grown. They have a much higher incidence of abuse of nonmedical prescription opiates (NMPO), which often leads to stronger drugs (Wall et al. 2018).

The increase in substance abuse and its health consequences place a burden on our society, and in fact, the financial costs associated with the misuse of these drugs in general totaled 120 billion in health care (Mclellan 2017). As marijuana becomes legalized in more places throughout the United States, an increase in prescribed drug use (and addiction to it) will likely follow with an increased criminal justice cost (Becker 1968). Given that the millennial generation may be more familiar with medicalized marijuana, it may be also likely for millennials to use it for self-medicating, as a reaction to a lack of economic opportunities (Salas-Wright and Vaughn 2017). This evidence is now directing us to a perhaps even stronger nexus between economic insecurity/uncertainty and drug use among millennials (Perron et al. 2017), and within the millennial population, increasing drug use has created serious health concerns (Cleveland 2016).

This moral panic associated with millennials may be more problematic in that although crime rates in general are declining, racial/ethnic tension among millennials has become more salient (Sommers and Ellsworth 2009). For example, while whites and nonwhites have similar rates of drug use (Harrell and Broman 2009), racial minorities are more likely to be targeted as drug dealers or drug users (Beckett, Nyrop, and Pfingst 2006). Incidentally, a recent report also reveals that the Los Angeles Police Department frisked blacks and Latinos for drugs more often, although whites were more likely to have illegal contraband (Poston and Chang 2019). Perhaps not surprisingly, it has also been reported that there are racial disparities in arrests and sentencing for drug defendants (Alexander 2011). Similarly, black men who self-reported no offenses were over four times more likely to be arrested at the beginning of the twenty-first century than nonoffending blacks of the previous generation. Moreover, when self-reporting no offenses, black men are 31.5 percent more likely to be arrested than whites of the same generation who did not self-report any crimes (Weaver, Papachristos and Zanger-Tishler 2019).

Given these disadvantages observed among the racial minority, current policing is now being challenged with nonwhites protesting and demanding change in arrest rates and police brutality (Forman 2012). In fact, millennials are known as the information generation, and thus we see an increase in a millennial-led social movement that addresses the marginalization of African Americans, as with “Black Lives Matter” and “Say Her Name” through social media. For example, in the Twitter community “Do Your Thing,” when someone posts a video, users make the video go viral by retweeting it. Millennials tend to seek out information online (Lenhart et al. 2010). This information includes the effects and side effects of drugs, as well as where they can be accessed.

While millennials did not see Elvis performing on stage during his time, they may search for information on him without the racially tinged moral panic that gripped their grandparents and great grandparents, as millennials are more racially tolerant than prior generations. Despite the fact that they have greater exposures to illegal substances as well as prescribed drugs than Baby Boomers and Generation X, millennials benefit from ample information and scientific knowledge potentially made available to them through various sources, including social media. What remains is a structural oppression and discriminatory practice against millennials of color. In the next section, we discuss critical issues that we, as educators, encounter in our classrooms while teaching at college, with a focus on the way they would like to learn from us, rather than how we would like to teach them.

Teaching Millennials and Generation Z

The last of the millennials were born in 1996 (Pew Research Center 2019), which would make the youngest of that generation 23 years old in 2019. Many undergraduates in college today are actually from Generation Z. Both generations have grown up with technology, influencing the manner in which they communicate, disseminate, and process information, making the two generations almost indistinguishable. However, it is Generation Z who grew up with an unprecedented connection to the worldwide web. This has become a major distinguishing characteristic of this generation. It has also caused a very predictable “moral panic” that such advances in technology and generational changes often do (Hampton and Wellman 2018; Herring 2008). Previous generations have contemplated the negative impacts technology has had on millennials and Generation Z, from critiques of their inability to have face-to-face conversations, to their increasingly shrinking attention spans, many have treated these generations as if they are hopeless slaves to their gadgets. Academics are not excluded from this “panic” as we have often heard them telling tales of student’s inability to go an entire class without checking their cell phones and in constant need of being entertained.

However, this moral panic about the decadent, deviant next generation is nothing new. Previous generations have rallied against the incoming generation, leaving each older generation sounding like the proverbial old man yelling “get off my lawn.” We fault millennials and Generation Z for their incessant need for the iPhone, constantly being “connected,” texting, overuse of emojis, photo documenting their lives, filtering their photos with doggy ears, all those “apps” they must have, their consumerism, and their obsession with celebrity. This viewpoint does not consider that millennials and Generation Z did not create this society or these gadgets but are reacting to and interacting with them (Hampton and Wellman 2018; Herring 2008; Kesici and Tunç 2018). It was the previous generations who created these innovative technologies, then marketed them to this younger generation and the technology that has created this major cultural shift.

This research is based on previous literature and our use of auto-ethnography. According to Robert Emerson (2001:125), “Auto-ethnography seeks to draw data directly from the field workers own experiences and insights.” We draw on our own experiences as a teaching assistant and as an instructor at higher education over a number of years. Technology is here to stay and just as professors have had to do in the past, they must adapt. Adapting new pedagogies is never easy, as routine not only makes the job easier but also gives a sense of security and confidence in the known. These days, the Internet gives professors access to countless real-time resources that can be incorporated into their lessons. We have accessed the latest academic articles about social media sites as well as the sites themselves, play the latest “viral” videos, or analyze the posts of “influencer’s” (people who have a large enough social media following that they now have corporate sponsorship). For example, to illustrate Karl Marx’s (Marx and Engels 1996) theory of “commodity fetishism,” we use Facebook and Instagram as an example of how media sites use algorithms to customize advertising. We use the example of when an advertisement appeared on our Facebook feed showing a T-shirt that read “there is nothing more dangerous than an old sociologist.” This demonstrates how the advertiser knew our occupations and ages. This reveals the insidiousness of these targeted advertisements in creating an artificial “need,” transforming the “use value” of a T-shirt into a personalized commodity that transcends just mere clothing, separating it from its practical use or any acknowledgment of the workers who produced it. Thus, consumers are willing to spend much more money than the actual value of the T-shirt for this “unique” item. This helps many students relate the lesson to their own lives. Students are then able to relate their own experiences with targeted advertising. Technology also allows academics the opportunity to teach media literacy in real time. Most professors now have access to the internet in their classroom and can fact check popular misconceptions live, teaching their students how to distinguish between a reputable and faulty source in a more vibrant and relatable lecture.

Another point we would like to emphasize here again is that millennials and Generation Z students are more diverse than ever before. According to a report by the National Center for Educational Statistics (McFarland et al. 2017), the percentage of college students who are Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander, and African American has been increasing over the recent decades. Despite the increases, minority students, African American and Latinx students, in particular, have lower success and completion rates than their white counterparts. In a review of several studies by David Figlio (2017), students who have teachers who are from the same racial or ethnic group have higher success rates, arguing that this may be due to several factors including relatability, different behaviors, and different treatments by these teachers of their students. While these studies were on the K-12 system, there is no reason to believe this is less impactful for college students. In the climate of changing demographics among college students, professors will have to use more cultural inclusive and sensitive pedagogy and adjust their methods of incorporation.

Drawing on the above discussion, we offer some final suggestions that we hope you find helpful. First, you may have to be entertaining. Given that millennials and Generation Z’s use of technology gives them the capability of being constantly entertained, you have to make your lessons interesting, more kinetic, and relevant to your students, use multimedia, and combine lectures with small group discussions (Duse and Duse 2016). Second, use technology wisely. When using PowerPoint, do not place whole, lengthy definitions on your slides, and make a fewer number of slides to shorten lesson plans and allow more time for discussion (Apperson, Laws, and Scepansky 2006; Voss 2004). Showing videos can be a very effective teaching tool (Wasan, Darmawan, and Kustandi 2019). When showing videos, make sure they are ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant, and short (e.g., five to ten minutes). Third, be firm but flexible. Today’s students are not “slackers,” they are the hardest working students in U.S. history. More of them work their way through college and pay part or all of their tuition than ever before (Baker, Andrews, and McDaniel 2017; Daniels and Smythe 2019; Tuttle, McKinney, and Rago 2005). Fourth, a little humility goes a long way. Today’s students have the ability to fact check in the moment. Many professors fear being challenged by students, especially when the student is right. This vulnerability in front of your students teaches them to risk being wrong and that even faculty can make mistakes. Last, take more of a holistic approach to teaching. Familiarize yourself with the issues that your students face and resources they can access. With an increasing population of students of color, many of whom may be low income and have additional needs, being a faculty that cares and can help will increase student success and retention rates.

There is no reason to panic. Millennials and Generation Z, like all other generations, are misunderstood and we are overreacting (Herring 2008). Each generation brings new challenges and lessons to be learned, giving professors a new opportunity to transform their classrooms . . . one more time (Shatto and Erwin 2017).

Transitions to Adulthood for Millennials: The Case of South Korea

The above sections address some challenges brought by millennials focusing on the context in the United States. Now we turn our attention to other challenges around transitions to adulthood among millennials observed in Korea. Millennials in Korea share many of these generation traits with millennials in the United States; however, some of the generation-shaping characteristics among Korean millennials are more salient, in three important ways. First, demographically speaking, the Korean millennial birth cohort is much smaller, leading to a rapidly aging population. The millennial birth cohort is also smaller in the United States than their previous generations; however, the decline in Korea is more dramatic due to strict government driven family planning policies and campaigns throughout 1960s and 1970s. The total fertility rate (TFR) in Korea dropped significantly in the late 1970s, and in fact has continued to decline. Second, the Korean millennials grew up in a politically stable environment with advanced technologies and expanded broadband Internet, allowing them to embrace individualism over collectivism for a short time period. Third, millennials in Korea have much higher levels of education than their prior generations. In fact, the increase of the overall educational attainment is remarkable: Only about 20 percent of those ages of 55 to 64 have tertiary education; however, nearly 70 percent of those ages of 25 to 34 attained tertiary education (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] 2019), marking this proportion as the highest in the world.

These smaller sized, culturally embraced, and highly educated millennials in Korea have faced unique challenges. First, they experienced two major economic recessions early in their lives: the first one in 1997 as school-aged children or teenagers, and the second one in 2008 as teens or young adults. Many of them dealt with their parents’ abrupt job loss and/or experienced low income without prospect for a future during their childhood. In this circumstance, higher education at an elite university was often considered a primary way to climb the social ladder in Korea, leading Korean millennials to be in increasing competition to enter elite universities. Therefore, although opportunity for college education overall has expanded since the early 1980s and millennials are much smaller in population numbers, the parents of millennials had higher private education expenditure than their previous generations to finance their children’s college entrance to elite universities (Statistics Korea 2019b).

This overeducation among millennials has led to a mis-match between human capital supplied in the labor force and labor market demand. Thus, labor migration from a number of Asian countries to fill labor shortages in manufacturing and agricultural work has increased since the late 1990s, and yet unemployment rates are higher among young adults, which includes many millennials (Kim 2009; Statistics Korea 2020c). Moreover, even among employed millennials, they are more likely to have nonstandard jobs, such as temporary jobs, part-time employment, and self-employment, compared to previous Baby Boomer and Generation X generations (Statistics Korea 2017).

Higher levels of educational attainment paired with precarious economic circumstances have had substantial impact on the lives of Korean millennials in terms of marriage and childbearing. For example, Korean millennials tend to spend a longer time during their young adulthood having never been married. According to recent statistics, the average age of a first marriage is 32.57 years old for men and 29.96 years old for women as of 2015, when most millennials (if not all) would have completed at least their high school education. These ages have increased from 28.83 for men and 26.02 for women in 1998, when most Generation Xers would have been at least 18 and above. In fact, the age at first marriage continues to rise. In 2018, on average, people did not get married until 33.15 years old for men, and 30.40 years old for women in Korea (Statistics Korea 2019a).

Along with delayed marriages, the proportion of those who are never married has also increased. It is not known how many never married millennials are expected to eventually marry at some point over the life course. However, delayed marriages as well as the increase of never married individuals among millennials are clearly associated with whether or not and the number of children people are going to have. Similar to a number of developed countries, Korea has experienced a transition from high fertility to low fertility over the past few decades. However, this transition has occurred during a relatively short time period in Korea. For example, in 1970, TFR in Korea was 4.530, indicating that on average women were expected to have more than four or five children in their lives. This number dropped and became lower than the population replacement level, 2, for the first time in 1984. Since then, TFR has continued to decline and is 0.92 in 2019 (Statistics Korea 2020b)—a level that has not been observed in any OECD countries.

A number of social factors are responsible for these challenges among millennials in contemporary Korea. Among others, we provide two explanations that are seemingly more pertinent to the millennials’ decisions to get married and have children. First, economic constraints imposed on millennials may have discouraged them from getting married. As mentioned earlier, compared to previous generations, despite higher levels of human capital millennials have acquired on average, their economic prospects are not necessarily brighter. In Korea, people generally live with their parents until getting married and buy a house (or rent one by paying a large amount of money up front, typically around 40 to 60 percent of the property value) upon their marriage. However, many young adults are unable to afford to get decent housing, due to exceptionally high costs, without relying on support from their parents. A recent study shows that availability of financial resources from their parents is an important factor to consider when deciding to get married (Oh, Lee, and Woo 2020). In other words, for those whose earnings prospects are not promising or for those whose parents are not affluent enough to be financially supportive of their children, marriage, and married life, may be a luxury to have.

With respect to low fertility, to some extent, it reflects the increasing proportions of unmarried individuals in Korea where births out of wedlock are fairly low. However, marital fertility rates have declined as well. While a lack of financial resources is an important factor for marriage declines, existing literature suggests that higher levels of work and family incompatibility may be an important barrier for having children in Korea. The Korean labor market is very competitive, and overwork is a common practice. In addition, workers are often forced to stay late and/or come in to work during weekends without proper compensation (Jung et al. 2018). There are some policies designed to ensure more work–family balance which have been implemented in Korea in recent decades. However, because of the precarity of the labor market, combined with persistence of traditional gender role ideology in Korea, most of the work–family policies are extremely underutilized, not allowing millennials to have children while working without compromising their income and careers (Yoon 2018).

The above challenges that many millennials in Korea have faced can be demoralizing, and may sound alarming (if not panicky) especially for the following generations who were born in late 1990s, as they are just beginning to enter the labor market and establish their own family. However, we would like to note several positive aspects revealed among the millennials. One of them is that millennials are well educated and more aware of social disparities. They have raised their voices to speak up against unjust treatment at the work place, and a series of #MeToo movements have also been impactful in Korea (Hasunuma and Shin 2019). It is not clear if Korea will experience the second demographic transition in the near future. However, while still uncommon in Korea, more men with young children have taken family leave to take care of the children in recent years (Statistics Korea 2020a). This implies that although it may take some time until alternative forms of family (e.g., cohabitation) are widely accepted, millennials seem better at sharing childcare responsibilities within a couple at least, compared to previous generations.

Conclusion

There have been numerous discourses around millennials and some of them may sound worrisome. In this study, it is our attempt to recognize unique characteristics of our younger generations, to find ways to better understand them using multiple angles, and to identify reasons as to why we should stay hopeful about the future. This study is somewhat unusual in that it discusses millennials and moral panic in terms of three different aspects (i.e., criminal justice, teaching at higher education institutions, and transitions to adulthood). While we are unable to provide a more in-depth discussion on each area, we believe that our study can serve as a good place to have scholars of various interests and expertise and educators at higher education institutions engaged in meaningful conversions about our younger generations. Our society will continue to change, often in unpredictable ways, and there will always be a new generation in the future. Our relationship with younger generations (in criminal justice system, classroom, or with respect to transitions to adulthood) should be one where we learn from each other and find ways to work together.