The firmly held American belief that anyone can be successful through hard work and perseverance has been steadily eroding the last few decades.

A new study from the Urban Institute found that roughly people up to age 40 have accrued less wealth than their parents did at the same age, even as the average wealth of Americans has doubled from 1983 to 2010.

There are a multitude of reasons why adults in their mid-30s and younger have fared worse than their parents. For one, since its peak in 1999, median income adjusted for inflation has declined and stagnated.

Most recently, the Great Recession of 2007-8 created a brutal job market that continues to disproportionately affect younger workers. While the unemployment rate currently stands at 7.7 percent for the country, the unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds remains at 24.2 percent, and 13.3 percent for those age 20 to 24.

The causes for younger generations having less wealth is the continual rise of student loan debt that has encumbered students with heavy financial burdens, taking decades to pay off and decreasing the amount of disposable income available to them.

A study of Federal Reserve data by the Pew Research Center found that “40 percent of relatively young households had student debt as of 2010, up from 34 percent in 2007.”

And those who earned a bachelor’s degree in 2011 graduated with an average of $26,000 in debt, according to the Project on Student Debt.

The future of younger generations appear equally bleak as spending on entitlement programs for the retiring workforce continues to skyrocket and spending on education has been on a flat trajectory.

For example, the federal government spent roughly one-eighth on education as it did on Social Security at a staggering $107.6 billion in 2012, according to the New York Times.

The declining importance of education in public budgets is worrisome just as the economy is slowly recovering. We must do better to educate our youth because they are the engines of economic growth.

The generational disparity that we are witnessing is unusual for this country and some see it as a harbinger of American decline. Instead, it should be viewed as a sizable obstacle that encourages our legislators and the American people to engage in bipartisan dialogue and to make much-needed reforms to restore the American Dream for future generations.