9.3.2026

Young/adult

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Loan, apartment, wedding, children – all cornerstones of adulthood. Yet they also represent decisions many students no longer believe they will ever make. Instead, students dream of a small rental apartment owned by someone else, with a fridge they could fill up with food.

 

Looking at the meme above, I can see broad and diverse reasons underlying it. Young people today no longer believe in their future or that they will ever reach the milestones of adulthood. News feeds are of no help with fostering faith in the future either. In a working life saturated with artificial intelligence, even higher education graduates no longer find it as easy to find a job as before. Dating apps and the chaotic nature of job-hunting offer a healthy dose of rejection, and the idea of needing to optimise everything in one’s life ensures that you always feel like you should be something more than you are: more beautiful, more productive and just better[1].

According to a US survey conducted in 2024, [2]adulthood is often associated with financial independence and moving away from home. The experience of growing up is an important part of people’s wellbeing[3]. However, the young generations have begun to fall behind. The wealth of those born in the 1980s never rose to the levels achieved by the previous generations[4], and the purchasing power of the youngest generations has not increased at the pace set by the previous ones.

Instead of a bright future, students today get to stress over their increasing student loan burden and interest rates and to live in poverty. According to the Finnish Student Health and Wellbeing Survey,[5] income difficulties among students have increased from 2021 to 2024 and nearly 18% of students have had to compromise on buying medicine due to a lack of money. As the government dreams of a spending binge at the altar of gross national product, students buy what they can. It just is not all that much.

How could students believe that they can become capable and financially independent adults with a home, a career and a family when the material conditions for it simply are not there?

If graduating into an uncertain employment situation with a massive loan feels like a terrible idea, students are practically stuck: the therapy guarantee – the promise to get short-term therapy within 28 days of contact –[6] ends when they turn 23 years old. Months of student aid ending force students to graduate, and the global political situation does nothing to alleviate the pressures on individuals.

It is difficult for individual students to feel like they could change anything. Hopelessness already emerged as a theme in the 2024 Youth Barometer[7]. During the 30 years the barometer has been running, around 80% of young people have had a positive outlook on their future. In the 2024 barometer, this figure crashed down to 61%. The 2024 World Happiness Report[8] stated that the happiness of Generation Z is lower than that of older generations almost everywhere in the world.[9] These figures are worrisome.

Should we change our conception of adulthood then? Or should students be guaranteed a future they can feel they have a chance to achieve? Or perhaps the current student generation should just eat humble pie and accept the facts: you are doomed to be overburdened with debt, live on rent, not start a family and forget about hope.

Hope can be increased through action. Wales already included the rights of future generations that need to be taken into account in decision-making processes in its legislation a decade ago[10]. The eternal political oscillation in Finland would benefit from future generations always being included in the planning stages.

The therapy guarantee should also be developed. The current age limit of 23 years leaves a considerable number of students outside the guarantee. Even the students who are covered by the guarantee by virtue of their age receive a varying degree of help due to the emphasis on methods and diagnoses in the legislation governing the therapy guarantee[11]. And it might be wise to do something more impactful about the climate crisis too so that we will not all be cooked alive before the future we will hopefully, at some point, be once again hoping will arrive is here.

Around this time one year from now, the nomination of candidates for the parliamentary elections will end and the election debate will start to heat up. The next elections provide a fantastic opportunity to give students hope that decisions could also take their perspectives into account. Could we try to offer some hope instead of threats and warnings about public debt this time? Taking care of students’ income and wellbeing and securing the resources of higher education institutions would already get us pretty far in improving students’ faith in the future.

Let me venture to dream a bit: What if students could have at least an average-sized apartment, perhaps even one owned by themselves? What if they could also buy enough food for themselves and their loved ones? I would like to believe that this is possible – is that too much to ask for?

 

Nikola Eerola

Member of the Board in charge of social policy and equality

 

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