MSU Mankato study: 'American Dream' varies among Boomers, Millennials

CATHY WURZER: Can I ask you a question? How do you define the American dream? Is it a house and a white picket fence? Maybe a home in the suburbs? A general feeling of security, a lot of money? A study from the university, Minnesota State University Mankato, asked millennials and baby boomers about what the American dream looked like in their eyes and found some generational differences.

Kristin Scott is the primary author of the study. She's with us. She's a professor of Marketing at MSU Mankato. Professor, thank you for taking the time.

KRISTIN SCOTT: Thank you for having me.

CATHY WURZER: There's always a spark behind research. There's always a story behind how someone starts. What's your story? What got you interested in looking into this?

KRISTIN SCOTT: No, I actually had this idea a while ago that maybe the American dream was dead amongst younger generations. And so that was really my spark to think about, well, what does the American dream mean for people and how has it changed over time?

CATHY WURZER: And why did you get that feeling that the American dream might be dead, for some of the younger folks out there?

KRISTIN SCOTT: Maybe it was a little personal influence as well in terms of just being around college students, too, and thinking that maybe it seemed outdated. It seemed like something that your parents had back in the '50s, and now we didn't need it anymore.

CATHY WURZER: So you looked at the Boomers, folks born between 1946 and 1964, and the Millennials, born between 1980 and 1996. So you looked at this-- that's a tough word to say-- generationally. What were you hoping to find out?

KRISTIN SCOTT: Well, I think that one of the big things was, the first question that we asked people was, how do you define the American dream in your own words? And I think that this was one of the big contributions to our research. Because a lot of times when we do opinion polling for the American dream, we're asking them specific aspects of the American dream, like home ownership, rather than asking them, well, what do you think the American dream is. So instead of giving them the answer, our first question was just asking them about the American dream overall.

And it was really interesting to read through the responses. So we had 250 Millennials and 250 Baby Boomers answer the question. And some of the responses, you had the cliche picket white fence answers all the way to some people called it the American Nightmare.

CATHY WURZER: What were they saying when they said it was the American Nightmare? Curious.

KRISTIN SCOTT: That would have been a great follow-up question. That's one of the things that I would like to know if we could have gone back and asked them, what's so horrible about the American dream? But it was just an open ended question on the survey, so we weren't able to probe any more about that. But that would be really interesting.

CATHY WURZER: So were you surprised by the results?

KRISTIN SCOTT: I guess overall, the generations were fairly similar with some interesting differences. I think that one of the interesting things is that the American dream for both generations is about family. And I don't know if that gets talked about enough when we talk about the American dream. It's always pinned on homeownership. But for both generations, it is about home ownership, but it is about family. And I think that that's an important aspect to talk about when we talk about the American dream.

CATHY WURZER: That is interesting. I wouldn't have said that, I guess. And I wonder how that comes across in terms of the responses, what, the freedom to be with one's family or to have a family? I don't quite understand, I guess.

KRISTIN SCOTT: Yes. So it is about having a family. And this can be using the word family. It could be having a spouse. It could be children all in the same category. So it's just somebody saying, you've got a spouse, a couple kids, maybe a house. And so they're really referring to that overall package about, it is a house and family and having a good life.

CATHY WURZER: Any other generational similarities that you discovered?

KRISTIN SCOTT: So when we asked them to rank the factors in terms of how they would define the American dream, rather than just asking them open ended, we gave them a list of, here's some factors, rank them in order from 1 to 10. So for both generations, the top four were the same. They ranked them slightly different, but they were still the top four.

So they were freedom, happiness, family, and equal opportunities. And what's interesting is that those were our top four. And then at the bottom were things like financial wealth. And that really came across in the open ended question as well, is that the American dream is really about living comfortably. It is about being able to pay your bills and having a comfortable life. It's not about amassing abundance, having a lot of wealth. It is just more in terms about having a nice life.

CATHY WURZER: That is kind of interesting, because I would have thought you would have said to me-- because we look at ourselves as being a real consumerist sort of a society, we're always buying things-- I would have thought you might have said that folks would have enough money to buy whatever I want, more of a consumer-type focus, if that makes any sense, versus just, I want to be comfortable, financially comfortable in my life. Yeah. Interesting.

KRISTIN SCOTT: Right. And we found that the Baby Boomers, they talked a lot about just being able to pay debt. I mean, it was paying bills. And so it was just a real kind of being able to get by. But Millennials used a little bit more sophisticated language, talking more about being financially stable in terms of financial success. So it really wasn't a lot of having tons of money. It was just more about living an OK life.

CATHY WURZER: The youngest participants in your study are, I believe, 28 years old. Any sense of what direction Gen Z might be moving in? Any plans to study their thoughts in all of this?

KRISTIN SCOTT: I think that that would be our follow-up research is-- and even maybe to go to Gen Alpha to see if this trend is going to continue. So do we continue going away from what the traditional American dream has meant and redefining it? Or will we see a boomerang effect and coming back to a more traditional American dream, especially in terms of something like security?

So maybe you had a little bit of the Millennials getting away from the Baby Boomers. The American dream is the cliché white picket fence where dad goes out and works and mom stays home, and we've gotten away from that. It'd be interesting to see if the younger generations come back to that traditional idea of the American dream or if they keep distancing themselves away from that.

CATHY WURZER: So what do you want to do with this work ultimately? I'm curious.

KRISTIN SCOTT: Well, yeah, we published this study. And our next study that we're working on is actually looking at the Chinese dream, and so seeing how that differs from the American dream and how the Chinese consumer looks at their values and aspirations.

CATHY WURZER: OK, so I asked you about the spark when our conversation first began. You personally told me about what got you started. After reading through all these responses, has your vision of the American dream changed at all? Does it dovetail with what you heard?

KRISTIN SCOTT: I still kind of see it as outdated, the way we've traditionally thought about it, the idea that you live in the suburbs, you have the family, and dad goes to work and mom stays home. I think that personally and I think that as a country we might have moved farther away from that cliché of what the traditional American dream meant in the 1950s.

CATHY WURZER: Interesting stuff. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for the conversation.

KRISTIN SCOTT: Yeah. Thank you, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: Kristin Scott is a professor of Marketing at Minnesota State University Mankato.