The article which I found for this fact check came from USA Today, claiming that young Americans, namely Millennials, are delaying marriage due to student loan debt. USA Today bases this on a study from Lendkey, a cloud platform which allows lenders and borrowers to match online in an attempt to “create the most transparent,accessible and low-cost borrowing options in online lending” (Lendkey’s About Us Page). The article claims that “about one-third of respondents between ages 18 and 34 say they might postpone marriage” in order to pay off student loans. Setting aside that the title of the USA Today article makes it seem as though most or all Millennials are doing this and not merely one-third, the fact I will be checking is whether a significant portion of young people are indeed putting off getting married due to student loan debt.

Checking for previous work proved to be difficult for this. DuckDuckGo searches proved unfruitful, as searching various versions of “millennial marriage debt”, “millennial loans marriage”, “millennial student loans marriage”, “millennial student debt marriage”, “millennial marriage”, “millennial loans”, and even things like “Lendkey student loans” and “Lendkey millennials”. None of these searches yielded pages from Politifact, Snopes, or FactCheck.org which gave figures on either Millennials’ student loans or their marital status. The Wikipedia page for Millennials says under the Social Tendencies section that Millennials “the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt and unemployment” than previous generations, that projected trends in 2014 suggested “millennials will have a lower marriage rate compared to previous generations”, and that Millennials often “delay some activities considered rites of passage of adulthood” such as leaving their parents’ home and living with a romantic partner. The Millennials page did cite a 2014 article from CNN Money discussing Millennials’ trends with marriage, and this article does also claim “that college graduates marry later so they are better able to ride out poor economic times just after they finish school”, citing an Urban Institute report. It is worth noting that CNN’s hyperlink on “college graduates” leads to a page on https://buzz.money.cnn.com/, which seems to be a site made with WordPress. The particular page it leads to only discusses a book which encourages graduating women to lean into their careers and does not actually reference Millennials, marriage, or student loan debt. Overall, checking previous work does seem to suggest that Millennials are getting married less, that they have more student loan debt, and that they are delaying milestones of adulthood, but there is little there to prove too much correlation.

With previous work leading to little verification of the claim, I then went upstream on the USA Today article. I first went back to the USA Today article and followed a link to the page where Lendkey discusses their findings. Their findings match the figures cited in the USA Today article, claiming that one third of respondents to their survey between 18-34 “said they might postpone marriage — or had already done so — until student debt is paid off”. The bottom of this page discusses the methodology of this study, saying “All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc.  Total sample size was 1,037 adults who have ever attended college. Fieldwork was undertaken between December 9-13, 2019.  The survey was carried out online.” YouGov Plc. is, according to Google, “a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm, headquartered in the UK, with operations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific”. This lends some legitimacy to their study as it was conducted by a recognized market research firm, thought there might be issues due to their being based in the UK and the sample size. Since they are in Britain and do not specify where their respondents were from, they may be British respondents and thus might not be representative of trends among American Millennials. In addition to this, the survey had just over 1000 respondents across all age brackets and does not specify how many of them were Millennials. Thus, while one third of their Millennial respondents might be postponing marriage, if their actual proportion of Millennial respondents is small then it might not be representative of the actual population of Millennials.

The USA today article does also provide the link to a separate study conducted by Credit Karma among 1,036 American Millennials which suggests that “55% of dating Millennials from a recent Credit Karma survey say they don’t want to get married until their finances are in order” and that 43% of these Millennials list paying down a loan or debt as one of the financial goals they want to achieve. This survey looked at a slightly more relevant demographic, “adults aged 25-38 in a relationship”, which combined with the defined American base makes these findings slightly more reliable.

Overall, while there does not seem to be much previous work, there are multiple studies which suggest that Millennials are getting married less, that they do have large amounts of student debt, and that a significant portion (though perhaps not a majority) are delaying marriage until their finances improve and loans are payed down or off entirely. Thus, while I would hesitate to say that this trend represents the entirety of the Millennial generation, it does appear that this claim is a fact, as it is agreed upon by people who deal with loans and have surveyed Millenials that a decent portion of Millennials do in fact put off marriage due to debt, which often takes the form of student loan debt due to the age of this demographic.