Brain Bites – Issue 8

Brain Bites are “now and then” updates regarding trends, statistics, and interesting info-bites in personal economics. These tasty tidbits help maintain your edge over an unpredictable future. Think of them as cerebral snacks for the hungry mind!

Move over Boomers

As of 2015, Millennials—those born between 1980 and 2000—are now the largest group in the U.S. workforce. They make up 37% of the total, compared with 34% for the Baby Boomers.
Ref: Corporate Executive Board

Smart cookies

34% of Millennials have a bachelor’s or more advanced academic degree, making it the most educated generation ever.
Ref: Parade Magazine

The emperor has no clothes

A group of hackers called Impact Team stole the Ashley Madison database and released the bare necessities: 30 million users’ names, addresses, and personal details such as GPS co-ordinates and sexual preferences. Catering to adulterers, the website is festooned with icons emphasizing trustworthiness, security, and discretion. Oops.
Ref: The Economist

Debts of gratitude

The number of Americans with at least $100,000 in student debt has more than quintupled from about 400,000 in 2004 to 1.8 million in 2014. But these represent only 4% of all student loans—and 90% of these borrowers are doctors, lawyers, business school graduates, and others who have earned graduate degrees. Students who graduate from a four-year institution carry, on average, a debt of about $27,000.
Ref: Lamar Alexander, U.S. Senator

Because they’re worth it

New federal regulations will require most public companies to disclose the ratio of the CEO’s annual compensation to that of the median compensation of the company’s employees. In 2014, Discovery Communication’s CEO took home the gold at 1,951 to 1 ($156 million). Chipotle Mexican Grill’s CEO captured the silver at 1,522 to 1. That salada tacos.
Ref: Glassdoor

Equal opportunity employers

In December, 2015, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter ordered all combat jobs open to women. Earlier that year, the Army graduated the first two women from its grueling two-month Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Navy also opened its SEAL teams to women if they can meet the standards. The Secretary set April 1st, 2016 as the deadline for all services to begin integration.
Ref: Associated Press

Take ‘er down!

The first 38 enlisted female sailors to serve aboard a submarine have been selected. The Navy currently has about 50 female officers serving on submarines.
Ref: Naval Submarine League

$375. $400. Who’ll gimme $425?

College textbooks have officially reached the stratosphere at $400 (new) and $300 (used) for a chemistry course book. Between 1998 and 2014, textbook prices increased by 161%, more than the cost of medical care and new homes. Going back to 1978, prices are up 945%.
Ref: Inside Higher Education

No way, José

Faced with the prospect of paying several hundred dollars for a single textbook, a 2014 survey found 65% of students mooned it and chose not to buy. They did so, even though virtually all of them feared it would hurt their academic performance.
Ref: Pew Research

Lookin’ for a home

Millennials are very interested in buying a house, but they’re delaying that decision because of the down payment (the median first time home buyer is age 33). A striking 46% of renters ages 25 to 34 spend more than 30% of their incomes on rent, leaving little for savings.
Ref: Joint Center of Housing Studies

Queen’s English spoken here

New words added to the 2015 Oxford Dictionary (online version): awesomesauce, cat café, onboarding, Grexit, MacGyver, rando, and mkay.
Ref: Oxford University Press

Gimme a brake

In a 2015 survey of 2,052 adults, 74% of those 18 to 34 said they were irked by spelling mistakes in social media.
Ref: Harris Poll

Marriage Arts 101

College graduates are more likely to get married—and stay that way. In a study of young Baby Boomers up to age 46, only a quarter of college graduates get divorced by middle age. And less than 10% of births to college-educated women are out of wedlock; for mothers without a college degree, more than 50% are.
Ref: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Making their debut

Millennials are having more and more babies in wedlock each year. This year, 59% of their children will be born to married parents. Demographers predict that share will ultimately rise to around 77% over the next 10 years.
Ref: Demographic Intelligence

Big bro is watching

Advertisers in Birmingham, England plan to capture images of train commuters and beam them back to computers. Crowd characteristics like gender and age will be analyzed and the data used to create giant real-time billboard ads atop the station’s busiest entrances.
Ref: Big Brother Watch

Did you notice?

Facebook recently changed its “friends” icon and put the female avatar in front of the male icon. It also made some subtle changes to the “dos” of both icons.
Ref: The Washington Post

The information in Brain Bites is sourced from a variety of usually reliable publications. Nevertheless, we cannot guarantee the accuracy or currency of this material and a degree of common sense should be applied before quoting it. If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is.

Image credit: “Jelly Brain Dissection” by Guerilla Science (2010), licensed/modified (red ring removed) by permission of copyright holder.