Most people still want the American dream, but they don't believe they'll ever get there, according to poll results released Wednesday.
The survey of 1,502 U.S. adults by The Wall Street Journal/NORC in July showed there is a gap between people's dreams of having a family, owning their own home, and retiring comfortably. The poll had a margin of error of +/- 3.3 percentage points.
Most people, especially younger Americans, don't believe they'll see that dream come true, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
High interest and monumental student loan debts are pricing younger generations out of home ownership, particularly, the poll showed.
Of those questioned, 89% said that it's important or essential to their goals to own a home, but just 10% felt it is easy or somewhat easy to buy that roof over their heads.
Similarly, 96% of those surveyed thought it is essential to have financial security and to be able to retire comfortably, but only 9% said they think it is easy to make happen.
Meanwhile, the poll revealed that 62% of Americans think it's either essential or important to their view of the American dream to be married, but only 47% of them think that will happen easily.
The numbers have drastically changed in a short time, the Journal reported. In 2012, researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute asked 2,501 people if they think the American dream "still holds true," and more than half said they still believed it did.
But when the Journal asked that question in the July poll, only about a third of those responding were optimistic.
"Key aspects of the American dream seem out of reach in a way that they were not in past generations," Emerson Sprick, an economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told the Journal.
Private-sector pensions are continuing to decline and in many cases have all but disappeared, Sprick said. The costs of buying a home have also skyrocketed, destroying that part of the American dream for many, he added.
Young people are no longer growing up to be financially better off than their parents were, the Journal reported, citing research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Nathaniel Hendren and Harvard University economist Raj Chetty.
About 90% of children born in 1940 ended up being better off than their parents, the research showed, but by the 1980s, that number dropped to half.
Hendren told the Journal that younger adults were able to get a slight boost in income after the COVID pandemic, when wages for lower-income Americans grew faster than for other people.
But still, he said it's a "coin flip" whether younger adults will earn more than their parents, as mobility hit a record low in the early 2020s.
Chetty, meanwhile, looked at achieving the American dream from the standpoint of examining how difficult it would be for someone starting in a poor family to climb to the middle class.
White Americans have found that goal more difficult in the past 15 years, he said.
Owning a home is also far out of reach for many Americans. According to commercial real estate services firm CBRE, it cost a record 47% to own than rent over the 12 months ending in June, even with rents skyrocketing along with home purchase costs.