Pew on America at 250 years old: Older, more diverse, fewer marriages

Christina Van Waasbergen

(CN) — With the U.S. set to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding in July, a report by Pew Research released Wednesday details how Americans today are older, more racially diverse and increasingly unmarried compared to 50 years ago.

The report, which explores how the country has changed in the last half-century, finds that the population of the U.S. has aged significantly in the past five decades, with the percentage of Americans age 65 and older nearly double what it was 50 years ago, from 10% to 18%.

Americans are also getting married less, with the percentage of married adults falling from 69% to 50%. Meanwhile, the fertility rate, defined as the average number of children ever born to women age 40 to 44, has fallen from 3 to 2. Pew attributes this in part to delayed marriage, birth control and increasing employment among women.

“Women — who now have far more options outside of the home than they did in 1976 — have contributed to a boom in higher education and helped expand the workforce,” the report says.

The report also details other ways in which American families have changed, with fewer children growing up in two-parent households and an increase in multigenerational homes.

The U.S. population has also become substantially more diverse, with the percentage of Americans who are non-Hispanic white seeing a steady decline since 1970, while other racial groups’ share of the U.S. population has increased.

Hispanics have seen the largest growth, with their percentage of the population more than quadrupling. Meanwhile, the foreign-born percentage of the population has increased from an all-time low of 4.7% in 1970 to 14.8% in 2024.

Americans tend to view this increase in diversity positively, a separate Pew study found, with three-quarters of U.S. adults saying racial and ethnic diversity is a good thing for the country, and 62% saying it has a positive impact on the country’s culture.

In addition to demographics, Pew also looked at how employment trends and the economy has changed.

Americans have seen a sharp increase in education since 1970, with the share of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree growing from 11% to 37%, as well as a modest increase in labor force participation. Although labor force participation continues to be higher among men than women, there has been an increase in the percentage of women in the labor force, while among men there has been a decline.

“The transformation of the U.S. from an industrial economy to a service- and information-based economy has been accompanied by major changes in the workforce,” the report says. “Higher education enrollments vastly expanded, leading to more adults completing college. The U.S. labor force has grown, in no small part due to the increase in women working outside the home. Overall, earnings for the typical worker have increased.”

So have Americans’ standards of living improved? That depends on which measure you look at.

“As the economy has grown, the share of Americans in poverty has declined and poverty among older Americans especially has fallen sharply,” Pew says. “At the same time, the middle class has shrunk, and a growing share of adults are in the lower class. And homeownership has increased only marginally.”