This information is interpolated by Grok AI as exact percentages were not available.
Today there are 2 to 3x more college students than there were in the 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, just by how the data is counted, more young people today are shown as “living at home” just because of the far higher percent now attending college (and living at home while attending a community college or local 4-year college). I lived at home the first 2 years I was at a 4-year college and would have been counted as “living at home” in the late 1970s.
As Grok puts it
- In both eras, full-time college students are much more likely to live with parents or in dorms (which Census counts as “not living independently” until the 1990s; after that, dorms were reclassified, but many still live at home).
- Today: ~25–30% of 18–24-year-old college students live with parents (especially at commuter schools and community colleges). Another ~20–25% live in dorms (counted separately now).
- Boomer era: Far fewer students in college then, and most who did go to college lived on-campus or off-campus in cheap apartments (dorms were smaller, and many schools were commuter anyway).
Result: The sheer increase in college-going mechanically pushes up the “living with parents” percentage even if non-students behave exactly the same as in the 1970s.
Almost half of the increase in “living at home” is explained by the increase in college attendance, says Grok.
Fewer students going to college in the 1960s and 1970s also meant that most young people were working – rather than living at home and going to college.
See why it is incorrect to do direct comparisons between generations?
