This Is The Worst State for Millennials

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 27, 9:33AM EST

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This Is The Worst State for Millennials — © DavidByronKeener / iStock via Getty Images

For some reason, sociologists have decided to break Americans into seemingly arbitrarily chosen age groups. The Silent Generation is people born from 1928-1945. Baby Boomers covers people born between 1946-1964, Generation X are those born between 1965 and 1980, Millennials were born between 1981-1996, and Generation Z were those born between 1997-2012. The neat convention has been adopted as a common way to report attitudes by age groups and has made it into the common language, despite the question of its value.

The ways in which COVID changed life in America — among other things bringing a significant portion of the workforce the ability to telecommute — have encouraged some millennials to reassess where and how they want to live. In addition, many now have or are planning families and want to make the best decisions for their children as well as themselves.

24/7 Tempo has picked the worst state for millennials, using data compiled by the credit reporting and advice site WalletHub. The site compared states across five key dimensions: affordability; education and health; quality of life; economic health; and civic engagement. The dimensions were evaluated using 34 variously weighted metrics, including everything from singles- and family-friendliness to share of millennial smokers and binge drinkers to average earnings and labor force participation rate grown for members of the generation.

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The worst state for millennials is West Virginia. Here are the details:

> WalletHub score: 32.48
> Top metric: Affordability (#25 best in the nation)
> Millennials: 318,773 — 12th fewest

No one should be surprised by the selection. West Virginia might be the worst state for about everything. It has high poverty rates, low median household income, poor health outcomes, high obesity rates, low education rates, and has the largest drop in population between 2010 and 2020 according to the Census.

Click here to read These Are The Best and Worst States For Millenials

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.