The Millennials Come to Campus

FOR A DECADE, William Strauss and his coauthor, Neil Howe, have examined how generations of Americans have shaped and been shaped by history. Their 1993 book 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? was one of the first to explore in detail the generation that has come to be known as Generation X.

In their most recent book, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, the authors turn their attention to America's youngest generation, those who were born after 1980 and are now populating our colleges and universities. In this article, John Wesley Lowery, assistant professor of higher education administration and student personnel services at the University of South Carolina, talks to William Strauss about the Millennials and asks why Strauss is so hopeful about their future. Readers who want to continue the discussion of generations can visit www.fourthturning.com and www.millennialsrising.com.

LOWERY: Before we talk in detail about today's students, could you first describe how you define a generation?

STRAUSS: A generation is approximately twenty to twenty-two years long. It's about the length of time a society allocates for the period between birth and full adulthood. However, it's not just about how many years have elapsed. A generation is also defined as a series of birth cohorts who share a common location in history and a common peer persona that reflects their collective identity as well as a sense of having shared experi-ences. As we trace that through American history over the last two centuries, we see that generations range in length from seventeen to twenty-four years.

LOWERY: In your most recent book, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, you have written extensively about young people today, specifically, those members of the Millennial Generation born between 1982 and the present. Can you describe the characteristics that you see in this new Millennial Generation?

STRAUSS: The best way to think about Millennials is as a correction for Boomers—that is, many of the things Boomers were not, they are. They are reversing many of the trends of adolescence that their Boomer parents set in basically negative directions—aspects of substance abuse, crime, academic achievement as measured by aptitude scores, suicides, and accidents. Those are just some of the different indicators. In Millennials Rising, we identify seven attributes that mark the Millennials as different from Generation X and as a correction from the Boomers. We talk about their specialness, explaining that the Millennials have been perceived from birth as something unique and different and, in Boomer eyes anyway, better than Gen Xers. This of course nettles Gen Xers, who feel themselves stuck in a generational sandwich between two more powerful neighbors.

Millennials are sheltered and protected in ways that prior generations were not. On the whole, they have conventional points of view. They are turning back toward traditionalism, but with a modern twist. They are comfortable with a fresh application of older values. They are also pressured, feeling more stress at this age than any other generation had. They are oriented toward teams rather than the individual. They are considered as an entire group that is achieving, so the individual feels a little bit left behind if he or she does not keep pace with the group. This is very different from the way Generation X felt at the same age. The Millennials have very optimistic views about people. So, when thinking about Millennials, think about those seven attributes: conventional, confident, special, sheltered, pressured, achieving, and team oriented.

LOWERY: Was it this perspective that led you in your most recent book to describe the Millennials as the next great generation, comparing them to the GI Generation, which is now the oldest cohort of our society?

STRAUSS: Three things happen with generational change and rebellion that you can see repeating. One is the tendency to correct, if not overcorrect, for the perceived excesses of a dominant parent group. In the case of the Millennials, it is the Boomers, now the second-oldest generation. Of course for the Boomers, the dominant parent group was the GI Generation, or the World War II or “greatest” generation. The Boomers set themselves against their GI parents. Then you have the new generation cutting itself off from the style of its next elders, in this case Generation X, while trying to solve a problem that Generation X noticed but could not solve. For Millennials, this is the problem of forging community and the growth of community out of today's multicultural and splintered society.

The third thing that generations do is step into a void created by the passing of a generation that filled a social role throughout its life and that is relinquishing that role. Today that's happening with the GI Generation that won World War II as footsoldiers. That is not a new role in history, but it is a role that felt new at the time. So right now, what feels new and what is the felt need not just for the kids but also for their parents and teachers? It is for optimistic, achieving, team-playing, confident doers rather than talkers. We are not searching for great culture creators but for great institution builders. In the Boomers’ time, older people were searching for iconoclasts and antiauthoritarians—and found them. These days Boomers seem to be pushing their kids to be anticynics and accepters of authority.

LOWERY: So how can we differentiate between Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials?

STRAUSS: If you take a look at those born in 1982, you will find that they have been more sheltered by their parents throughout their childhood and regarded as more special than, say, Boomers or Gen Xers. We've identified them as the post-consciousness revolution of children. What we mean is that they were born at a time when the revolution was winding down and dramatic change was coming to an end. Children became a cultural and family priority again, which they weren't during the Gen Xers’ childhood years. This is very clear when you look at the movies and the political trends and the family behavior. Kids came last, and now again kids come not just first but aggressively and assertively first. If you look at some of the national data, you can see that the crime rate is going down among these kids. It's coming down sharply: homicide rate is down two-thirds, and crime victimization rate is way down. Notwithstanding all of the publicity about school violence, rates are going down. There are roughly two-thirds fewer kids being killed in schools than there were in the early nineties when we started keeping records. In the year of the Columbine killings, the number of other violent deaths in American schools, including suicides, was only eleven. This current school year, before the Santana incident, there had been only five violent deaths, two of them suicides. One of the three other deaths was a teacher killing a teacher. It's odd, but the media never include these data in their stories about school violence. On achievement tests, we are starting to see scores coming back up on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and state standards tests, especially if you disaggregate the scores for different ethnic groups.

LOWERY: Given these profound differences between the Millennials and the generations of students that higher education has served for the past few decades, what changes do you predict for colleges and universities in the coming years as the Millennials come to dominate?

STRAUSS: The number one thing to realize with the Millennials is that as a whole they reflect much more parental perfectionism than any generation in living memory. Colleges and universities should know that they are not just getting a kid, but they are also getting a parent. The college decision is a co-purchase decision more than ever before. More than Gen Xers at that age, today's teens get along with their parents, they rely on their parents, and they share their parents'attitudes and values, although they may consider themselves as a more pure embodiment of those values than the parents, because they're prepared to actually live by the values whereas Boomers are not perceived as being particularly good at that. So the parents will be involved for better or worse in the admissions process, actually starting with the recruitment. In order to recruit kids, you have to recruit their parents, too. From the admissions process all the way through the college experience, expect there to be more parental involvement and support—and more parental intrusion and annoyance. Colleges will find ways to marshal the parents to do things that are helpful. Parents will be sending e-mails to professors and presidents, who may want to construct walls with “Keep Away” signs for parents.

LOWERY: Interestingly, and again this goes back to what you have been saying, colleges and universities have not heard the hue and cry from students in response to efforts to include parents more in the college experience that we would have anticipated if we had carried on the linear thinking of using Gen X and Boomer students as the model for the new students. An example of this would be parental notification policies in alcohol cases that a number of institutions have established.

STRAUSS: I heard a classic Millennial parent story about a kid who was being interviewed by an admissions offi-cer. The admissions officer said something, and the kid pulled out a cell phone, dialed up his mom, and said, “Here, can you repeat that to my mom?”The technology is an issue, too, because parents have often bought cell phones for their kids for the express purpose of being able to be in touch with them constantly. There used to be a little more of a dose of old-fashioned wilderness, when there was what you might call a “woods” between parents and their college-age kids. The parents couldn't get through the woods, and the kids were making it on their own. With Millennials, we seem to be moving toward an ultra-organized garden, with lawns tended and weeds clipped, where parents can, at least if they want to, see everything.

You 'll see Millennials becoming very serious students, relative to what came before. They are used to competing against their peers, even to the point of stress. They will appreciate being challenged and not look at that as a burden. They will want to get something out of college as a lifelong experience more than as a cash-value element of “What is this doing for me? What is this course, this year getting for me beyond its direct impact on my future salary? What is its marginal value?” They will listen when faculties tell them there is a base of knowledge that you should have, that we need to have a core curriculum because this is something that develops you into a fuller person over the course of your lifetime, even if there is not a particular job skill that you learn from taking a classical philosophy course. They will tend to take more of the long view, which reflects their optimism. They are prepared to lay the foundation for something that comes later. There will be less of a sense of instant gratification. People sometimes question us about this, saying that everybody and everything in America today is now, now, now, and our society feeds instant gratification. But to these kids, this society of instant gratification is the baseline world against which to pit their own rebellion. Their more likely course is to battle against it, not to push it to the extremes.

You will see on campuses a push toward a new traditionalism where students want to have a college experience in a classic sense. Parents will support this. The kids will be looking for this. I think that the college administrators will enjoy wrapping this around them. The ideas of college spirit and a nice-looking college campus are things the kids will expect and will contribute to themselves. It's very important for the public spaces of colleges to look good: places where the kids will eat, where they will congregate at the student union, the downstairs areas of residence halls. Actually, the whole notion of residence hall life is one that colleges will need to focus on. It's partly because these kids are affluent. They come with a lot more things. It's partly because of the expectations they have. Realize that three-quarters of these kids have not had roommates, ever. Kids are growing up in bigger houses with fewer kids, so the majority have not had to share a room. So they come into these residence halls where there's a room that is smaller than their bedroom with another person in it, with only one closet that needs to hold two whole sets of tech gear, with only one window, not good ventilation, and bathroom down the hall, and it doesn't quite feel right in those ways to them.

LOWERY: You talked a lot about the Millennials as being academically driven, competitive, and concerned about their academic success. Will this new generation be the antidote for the critiques of higher education we have heard so often over the past decade that have called into question not only the quality of undergraduate education in America but, perhaps more important, the quality of undergraduate students?

STRAUSS: Oh, yes. This group of kids has been one that society has wanted to do well—much more so than Gen Xers. There's this sense among adults of, “Oh my gosh, are they going to be like Gen X, only worse?” Sure, this may sound unfair to Gen Xers, and in many ways it is, but that attitude is definitely out there. You are seeing some criticism, and you are starting to see the praise, too. You are starting to see positive stories in news magazines, positive books, positive articles, positive talk in families, just in the institutional community. It's a sense that we can't be so negative about kids. Even in the face of all the media coverage of the periodic school shootings, we're beginning to see a change toward a more positive adult attitude toward teens.

Over the next ten years that change will probably intensify. We'll see increasing challenges to what you might call the Generation Y fallacy—the notion that Millennials are like Gen Xers, only more so—or another fallacy, that they want to be that way. Realize that today's teens strongly dislike the “Y” term. I've never heard any of them use it. For the most part they want to differentiate themselves from Gen Xers, and they would definitely rather feel and be treated like something new, not something further down the scale.

You can see a lot of Gen Y artifacts in the culture now, from ads to TV shows to movies. Before long, those will start giving way. Look at how a lot of the movies that are coming out now are still nasty in the veneer, but when you look underneath, the kids are sweet and they are making the right and sometimes safe choices. An example of a vulgar movie that exalts chastity is American Pie. What you are going to see over the next dozen years or so is a turn away from this nas-tiness and grossness (though not necessarily from vio-lence). The core Millennial aspects will begin to assert themselves as Gen X culturemakers start to realize what the market is—to realize that most of the people that make pop culture are in the late-twenties to middle-thirties age bracket, and those people are on the opposite side of the moon from teenagers. They seldom have teenagers as friends, siblings, or children. They don't socialize with them. All they can do is extrapolate their own remembrances and imaginings. That is not going to change, but you are going to start seeing the Millen-nials become a more powerful cultural force as they pass through college. You are already seeing it in the music business more than you are seeing it in film or TV at this point. So you have outdated, pseudo-realistic TV shows like Boston Public that say nothing about what high schools are like but a lot about how Gen Xers might imagine every trend of their high school years taken to its ridiculous extreme.

LOWERY: You talked about this coming generation having a focus on teamwork and what you have described as neotraditionalism. Should we anticipate that many of the things that have been in decline over the past decade on college campuses, such as fraternities and student government, will see a renewed popularity? Or will the Millennials be creating new campus traditions and structures?

STRAUSS: Some of both. There will be new communities that will organize. You are seeing right now an explosion of campus clubs. You are seeing a big growth in the number of small arts groups, a cappella choirs, and drama clubs. Students are busy. They are doing things, often quite amazing things. One of the real issues for colleges is going to be how to provide enough space so that all of these activities will be able to blossom.

LOWERY: We 've talked a lot about this idea that the Mil-lennials have enjoyed the most protected childhood in American history, with unprecedented levels of parental involvement, school uniforms, and zero tolerance policies. How do you think this broader trend of protected childhood is going to manifest itself on campus?

STRAUSS: These kids are concerned about physical safety. They have had that drummed into them, and they're used to it. The purpose of safety ought to be not to have it be too intrusive. Beyond the question of physical safety is the notion of the college community as a sheltered place that sets itself apart from the larger culture, the larger society. Here is one way in which student government could be important for Millennial collegians. There is a stirring of a civil renaissance in today's high schools. The idea of heavy participation in political activity is possible again. The events of this past year will definitely contribute to that. Today's teens are coming out of the Bush-Gore election with the notion that a person has a real responsibility to vote and vote carefully. They reveal this attitude not just in national politics but in student government, too. Colleges might consider giving the student government associations a little more budget to do some of the things that administrators might have in the past done themselves. If you give Millennials that opportunity and provide the right infrastructure and just enough (but not too much) adult support, I think you are going to be pleased with what happens.

LOWERY: This is very different from what we saw in the early nineties when there were a number of student governments that voted themselves out of existence or the students chose to vote them out of existence.

STRAUSS: That's a trend that began in the sixties and seventies, actually. When I came to college, student government was of some consequence. By the time I left, it was in shambles. The new concept was the notion, which now seems quaint, that thinly organized students in ad hoc associations were going to save the world. Now Millennials often come from high schools that took student government seriously, where large student events enhanced the sense of community. This lays the groundwork for college administrators to build a sense of community not just on campus but through community service and elsewhere.

Millennials are far more used to mandatory service obligations than Boomers or Gen Xers were at that age. Generation X was strong on volunteering, but now we have gone one step further to what high schools call service learning. It is not volunteering anymore. A student must do it.

LOWERY: Certainly, we have seen the leading edge of that in higher education. It is certainly expanding. The interesting thing is that now there is a group of students who actually want service learning and have known it in high school.

STRAUSS: I can imagine the service learning obligation being part of college graduation in the sense that everyone is expected to do something, and there are a lot of things that you can do within your campus or in the adjacent community. This gives a purpose for the students to organize themselves. They are good at organizing. They function well as teams. Use that. You can use it culturally, too. For example, a movie night might not necessarily mean made-in-Hollywood stuff but rather a real opportunity once a week for independent filmmakers on campus to have an automatic audience they can show their work to. Let collegians do creative things, and help them generate audiences and collaborators. If you succeed at this, you could have all kinds of exciting things happening on campus, where collegians are busy producing things that contribute to everyone's college experience. Done right, we could see a new golden age of campuses. By the end of this decade, Mil-lennials may well transform the American campus as much as Boomers did in the sixties, but they will transform it in the opposite direction.

LOWERY: I'm curious how you respond to those who are critical of your work, including those in higher education such as Arthur Levine, who criticized your work in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall of 2000 as artificial and simply stereotyped caricatures.

STRAUSS: I sometimes think the word generalization attaches to generational analysis because the terms are so similar. One could say the same thing about race or religion. There is nothing on its face that makes race a worthwhile topic to discuss. It's just a different skin color, but you have to look at it in terms of what is really going on historically. When identifying a pattern of history, the question always is, Are you right? Does your model work? Is there factual support for it, on the record? Is there an explanation for it? In our body of work, Neil Howe and I have tried to show all this, to explain why generational change happens. The bottom line is this: it makes sense, like the seasons of nature. Why does spring go to summer rather than the other way around? There is a reason. There is a seasonality to life and history that is in many ways a very positive thing. It is something you can look at and see happening, but without looking at generations you can't understand why it is happening.

LOWERY: I think we should note that most of the predictions you made about Millennials in your earlier book Generations—which was written when the oldest of the Millennials were about nine years old—have in fact come to pass.

STRAUSS: We wrote Generations a decade ago. We were the only ones who said that the crime rate would fall, that adolescent risk taking would fall, and that there would be a lot of political and cultural argument about this generation as they aged, and that all the fuss about babies in the 1980s would emerge into a fuss about teenagers around the turn of the century. We think that on the fundamentals, we were right. On the reasons, we were right, too.

These Millennial kids will define the twenty-first century as fundamentally as the GI or WWII Generation defined the twentieth. We should be thrilled by that. There will be a ton of history that will happen on their watch. We should realize that in creating them in the way we have, we are doing much as America did in the 1920s with the generation then in childhood. They created a generation that endured a depression, soldiered a war that civilization had to win, laid vast infrastructures, and landed on the moon. We have to give kids a chance to become something just as great. Given the chance, I'm confident that they will and that we, their elders, can watch them, take pride in them, and thrill in what they will achieve.