According to research by the Institute for the Study of Labor, graduating into a recession has a lasting adverse effect on young adults’ employment and earning, a phenomenon known as labor market “scarring.”
Zillow correlates this data with its own study on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March current population survey to analyze homeownership rates for successive groups of college graduates each year after graduation from 1976 through 2013. It found that graduating into a recession has an immediate and lasting effect on young adults’ homeownership rate.