It’s no secret that many Penn students are drawn to the city. The excitement and accessible attractions in Philadelphia are some of Penn’s strongest selling points. Like many people their age, Penn-educated millennials are becoming a highly urbanized generation, making plans conducive to an “up-and-about” city life.
These plans include eschewing many of the once-standard decisions that our parents almost automatically made. Big-ticket purchases like cars, washing machines and large houses are taking second place to more “portable” spending that makes moving to and living in urban centers easier.
Cars in particular are a purchase many millennials aren’t making. A Goldman Sachs survey from 2013 found that a full third of millennials don’t want a car at all, as it’s an added burden in cities with other transportation options.
Even at Penn, only 3 percent of students bring a car to campus, according to U.S. News and World Report in 2013.
“I hopefully will live in a city with good public transportation so I wouldn’t have to buy a car,” College sophomore Leo Page-Blau said. He added that while he had a car back home, he does not feel any particular sense of pride in owning one.
In absence of his own car, Page-Blau estimates that he uses services like Uber and Lyft about once a week.
A Wharton senior who currently lives off-campus and will be working in New York after graduation also uses other methods for transportation. “Using Zipcar is much cheaper than keeping a car on campus 24/7,” she said. She doesn’t plan on getting a car in New York.
“When I first moved into my apartment, I bought compact furniture from IKEA that I could easily carry with me when I moved,” the Wharton senior said. “Anything else probably won’t even fit in a New York apartment.”
As a senior, she also has a very practical reason for making big purchases like large appliances. “I’ll have a lot of student loans to pay back, so I don’t want any big purchases that make living in New York even more unaffordable.”
According to data from Career Plans Survey Reports, for the Class of 2014, a full 43 percent of College graduates and over half of Wharton graduates ended up in New York alone. Washington and Boston were other expensive post-Penn destinations.
When asked why he wanted to live in a city, Page-Blau cited his desired career path as one factor. “The work opportunities I want probably only exist in [major] cities.”
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