‘I Worried I Was Falling Behind, So I Did the Math on the American Dream’

The promise of the American dream has always rested on a simple assumption: Each generation should be able to do a little better than the one before it.

But lately, that promise seems to be under indictment. In the past week alone, I’ve read versions of the same grim story over and over: The dream is now gated, millennials will inherit too late (to be fair, I wrote that one), and the milestones that once marked a stable adulthood are arriving later, if they arrive at all.

I’m not immune to these dark ruminations. In fact, I often find myself gravitating toward stories about downward mobility because they speak to a feeling I have at the end of many days: This isn’t what I thought my 30s would be like.

And yet, through my work, I’m also exposed to plenty of research that complicates that despair. Many millennials are wealthier than the stereotype suggests. Homeowners are sitting on record gains. By some measures, the middle class has shrunk but stretched upward.

I haven’t been able to square these dissonances, so I sat down to find out exactly where I stand and what that says about my generation.

What is upward mobility?

As I set out to complete this project, one of the first things I realized is that I didn’t strictly know what upward or downward mobility means. Of course, I had a sense of it, but not an economic definition.

I found the clearest one in a 2025 peer-reviewed article by sociologist Deirdre Bloome in Sociological Methods & Research. Researchers, she writes, study intergenerational mobility by asking whether people’s adult incomes exceed their parents’ incomes “in dollars or ranks.”

Put more plainly: Am I making more money than my parents did? And do I occupy a higher rung of the economic ladder?

By the first measure, the answer is yes.

When my parents were my age, their household income was about $41,000 for a family of three. Adjusted for inflation, that would be roughly $82,000 today. Today, I make $105,000 for a family of me.

When looking at rank, there’s an even clearer story of upward mobility.

In 2000 in Phoenix, my family made about 88% of the city’s median family income of $46,467, placing us closer to the lower-middle edge than the comfortable center. But Pew’s calculator places me very comfortably in the middle-income tier for the New York metro area.

This didn’t exactly surprise me. I grew up acutely aware that the way my parents had to stretch to make ends meet wasn’t the same for the people around me. And while I am preoccupied with my balance sheet today, I’m definitely not reaching like they were.

Generationally speaking, this also seems to be true.

A 2024 Federal Reserve paper argues that millennials as a whole are doing better than their parents. Using a post-tax, post-transfer household income measure, it found that at ages 36 to 40, millennials had a real median household income 18% higher than the previous generation at comparable ages.

The wealth complication

Things get a lot more complicated when looking into my parents’ net worth versus my own.

To be clear, net worth is not the standard measure of income mobility. But it still offers a useful balance-sheet test of what kind of security higher earnings are able to offer. And by that measure, the story starts to turn.

My parents bought their first house in their 20s for a cool $64,000. By their 30s, it was worth closer to $100,000, and they had roughly $50,000 left on the mortgage. That left them with about $50,000 in home equity, before counting retirement savings or anything else they owned.

I may earn more than my parents did, but I own less. I don’t own a home, and when I weigh my debt against my savings, I have a negative net worth.

It’s a common story among my cohort. A 2024 analysis from UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab found a pronounced millennial dip around age 30, when the homeownership gap between millennials and baby boomers reached 15 percentage points.

Older millennials have started to close some of the homeownership gap, and their rates now look more similar to Gen X. But catching up later is not the same as starting from the same place.

Buying a first house by age 30 can leave homeowners with a 22.5% net worth bonus by age 50, or about $119,000 more, compared with waiting just 10 more years to buy, according to research from Realtor.com®.

The education factor

All those sour feelings that I’ve been harboring are starting to make a lot more sense to me now, in large part because the only debt that I have is federal student loans.

Neither of my parents had four-year college degrees. My dad was a blue-collar construction worker, and my mom worked retail. Both jobs required long, hard hours in exchange for wages that often seemed to fall somewhere between too little and barely enough.

So in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, I bought into the belief that college would be my ticket to the upper-middle class.

In one sense, it worked. In addition to being a first-generation college student, I was also a Pell Grant recipient—the kind of student who higher education is supposed to move upward. I earned a master’s degree, entered the white-collar workforce, and raised my income.

But it didn’t make me financially secure in the way I expected, and many more people in my position have found themselves facing the same reality.

Research from Pew shows that first-generation college graduates tend to have lower incomes and less wealth than graduates with at least one college-educated parent. And Pell recipients who graduate often leave school with more debt than their peers.

So am I downwardly mobile?

Despite those pressures, I’m still not moving backward. And I’ll be honest: I’m genuinely heartened by this finding.

I’ve spent too many nights in a cold sweat, wondering whether the investments I made in my education were worth it. Now, I can see the financial payoff more clearly.

The climb came with costs, but understanding the progress I’ve made also makes those trade-offs feel like the price of admission. It gives me something sturdier to hold onto than the ambient dread that my generation is simply broke or doomed.

There’s evidence that this is true for many more millennials, too. A 2025 St. Louis Fed analysis found that younger Americans, including millennials and Gen Zers, held more wealth than Gen Xers and baby boomers did at the same age.

But that finding comes with two crucial caveats: It measures wealth (not absolute mobility), and averages can hide who owns the assets doing the work. In the same analysis, the top 10% of households held more than two-thirds of all household wealth, while the bottom half held just 2.5%.

Doing the math on my own mobility helped me see this divide between income and assets, the top and bottom share of households, clearly. I suspect many others grappling with where they stand might benefit from the same exercise.

We may be doing better than we think, but the American dream was never just about earning more. It was about whether earnings could buy stability, ownership, and a future that felt easier to pass on.