[win311fwg]

> kind of like how people still talk about "millennials" like they're college students

Is that really an evolution? "Millennial" was coined to refer to the cohort that gradated from high school in the year 2000. Not all high school graduates become college students, of course, but if we are generalizing it isn't unreasonable to think of recent high school graduates as college students.

Now, there was nothing in the definition to declare if you must continue to recognize them for who they are going forward (i.e. 40-somethings now), or if you are to remember them in that moment as high school graduates, many of whom were college bound. So still thinking of "millennials" as being college students is a fair interpretation before evolution.

[jedimastert]

The term "millennials" referred to a specific cohort of people that all share similar experiences and therefore culture because they were born around a specific time (early ninties).

So yes, it would be an evolution to refer to them as college student age today

[win311fwg]

> The term "millennials" referred to a specific cohort of people that all share similar experiences

Exactly. That experience being coming of age at the turn of the millennium, with high school graduation being considered the milestone where one comes of age. Hence why Strauss and Howe called them millennials. While the people who were labelled millennials are no longer recent high school graduates, it is linguistically valid to remember them locked in that moment in time. High school graduation was the point of significance associated with the term.

> because they were born around a specific time (early ninties).

Easy to miscalculate, I suppose, but the cohort who graduated high school in the year 2000 were born in the early 80s.

"Millennial" did later evolve to be used where "Generation Y" was used previously. That represents a much larger age range — those born in the early 80s to mid-90s. Further evolution has seen millennial come to refer to those born in the latter half of the Generation Y, with "Xennial" showing up to refer to those in the earlier half. This might be where you had 90s kids in mind, but that is far from where the term originated. "Millennial" first appeared in 1987. Nobody was thinking about those born in the 90s at the time.