The Federal Reserve Bank of New York studied what it finds to be a direct tie between the increase households pay to educate their kids and the decline in homeownership rates among those kids when they graduate.

The data suggests that as local governments pay less and families pay more for college, weighing on students with loan payment responsibilities, those students are less likely to buy homes.

If we take a few steps back and look at this as a macro trend, we can see that education costs and healthcare related costs are the two areas that have most impacted household spending in the past decade or more. The change in outlays for those two expenditures have had a greater effect on financial resources to put into other areas--savings and investment, especially--than any other factor, and are among the strongest contributors to the lag in the release of pent-up demand following housing's Great Recession.

Marketwatch correspondent Jillian Berman offers analysis of the New York Fed research piece, whose conclusions give a data foundation to explain--at least in part--how both household formation and homeownership rates have been suppressed due to spiraling college costs. Berman writes:

The link between rising college costs, increasing student debt and declining homeownership is troubling, even if it doesn’t necessarily raise questions about the value of a college education. Earlier research from the New York Fed shows that young people with a college degree are more likely to own homes than their counterparts without a degree, even if they have debt. But college graduates with debt are less likely to own homes than those without. That indicates that the way we now fund higher education in this country — largely through debt — means that it’s a riskier decision and that risk disproportionately falls on already disadvantaged groups.

Still, we can't look at studies like this without an uneasy feeling that the helpfulness here is limited by a "framing effect" challenge.

Let's ask a question. If a young adult does not purchase a home between the ages of 28 and 30, an age range the New York Fed looks at, does that mean that person, or the household he or she forms, will economically underpeform what a 28 to 30-year old home buyer of a generation ago?

Another way to look at the issue and question is, will the upside of a college education today outweigh the disadvantage of getting a later start as an economic entity due to the impact of debt in one's earlier career?

And the big bottom line question is, how fundamentally negative has "the lag" in demand been as a result of young adults needing to work their way through a certain amount of college loan obligation before they start households, families, and a path to homeownership?

"The lag," thanks to capacity constraints that tie to labor and other productivity impediments, may have been a positive, when we step back and get that macro view.

Right now, it seems that young adults--millennials--are showing more and more signs of being a pent-up awakening giant.

Zelman & Associates notes in its latest The Z Report (start a free trial by linking here) that millennials have become a force to reckon with in the current leg of housing's recovery trajectory, noting:

"Our analysis indicates that not only are young adults buying homes, they are doing so at an accelerating pace. In fact, data from Ellie Mae's Millennial Tracker,, which covers individuals born between 1980 and 1999, revease that these approximate 18-37 year olds comprised about 39% of home purchases nationwide in 1Q17, up from 28% in 1Q14. We find this generation's progress towards homeownership all the more impressive given numberous headwinds of late, including the lowest-for-sale inventory relative to households since at least the early 1980s as well as higher home prices and interest rates that have increased the monthly payment on a typical entry-level home by 10% relative to 2016."

When pent-up demand starts to un-pend-up is when you really know it was pent-up.

Until then, you might conclude that something structural has changed in what people value as they start homes, and begin to mate, and work their housing preference into their most holistic financial plan for living.

Clearly, how young people start their economic lives as young adults is different, thanks in large part to skyrocketing healthcare and education costs. What's less clear is how these same folks move from the start to the next phase. It can be fast enough to make people forget it was ever pent-up demand at all.