Today’s young adults are more educated and remain unmarried and childless longer than their counterparts even 20 years ago. College-educated young adults also have become increasingly dispersed, having settled disproportionately in mid-sized cities in the US West and Southeast such as Denver and Atlanta at the expense of large cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago that were until recently the destinations for recent college graduates.
What are the consequences of young adults’ delayed family formation and geographic dispersion for America’s large cities? On the one hand, later marriage and childbearing may keep young adults in cities longer. Historically, parenthood has been the catalyst to move out of core cities to the suburban ring in pursuit of affordable single-family homes and better-funded public K-12 education. To the extent that young people take more time to get married and have children today, their departure from cities also may be delayed. But it is not clear whether any such gain in the stock of city residents is sufficient to offset a declining inflow of new entrants in terms of population size and consequent supply for the labor force, housing markets, transportation services, and consumer activity.
The proposed project will use data from the American Community Survey (ACS, 2004-2023) to describe the changing young adult composition of one US city: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia offers an important case study as one of America’s oldest large cities. For many years, it has been among the most affordable cities on the Northeast Corridor, offering proximity to New York and Washington, DC but with a substantially lower cost of living. The presence of many colleges and universities, a strong health care sector, the headquarters of Comcast Cablevision, and a robust fine arts and theater community attract a diverse, highly educated labor force. Yet Philadelphia is also the country’s poorest large city, and its K-12 public schools are among the poorest-performing schools in the nation; hence, the city is perennially at risk of losing young workers when their children reach school age.
The focus of this project is to ascertain and describe how Philadelphia’s young adult population is changing as a result of patterns of delayed family formation and competition for residents from growing mid-sized cities over the last 15-20 years. The direct output will be a set of data briefs that describe trends in the composition of the young adult population in Philadelphia that will be distributed through the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center in partnership with the Public Policy Lab at Temple University. This pilot project will lay the groundwork for a proposal to NICHD’s Population Dynamics Branch for a larger study that will (1) investigate how young adults’ marriage, fertility, and mobility patterns are reshaping the composition of large and mid sized cities nationally and (2) produce a statistical package that will allow users to produce the information summarized in our Philadelphia-focused data briefs for any US city or metropolitan area.
The principal investigator for this project is Paula Fomby. She will supervise two team members: a graduate research assistant who will provide expertise in working with the tidycensus package in R and an undergraduate research assistant who will conduct data analysis using ACS to generate key tabulations and visualizations for the data brief series. Fomby will have lead responsibility for writing the body of the data briefs. She will collaborate with PSC scholarly communications staff to publish and promote the data briefs to Philadelphia stakeholders and the population science research and teaching community. Data analysis will be completed in Summer 2024, with data briefs to be published and released in the 2024-25 academic year.
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