Connecticut’s teacher pension system isn’t working for millennials. That’s a problem.

Together, Connecticut towns employ almost 50,000 teachers, and the state uses them as a piggy bank to pay for teacher pensions, particularly teachers of the millennial generation who now make up the majority of today’s workforce.

That’s because nearly half of teachers will get no pension benefit at all. They will exit the system before their 10-year vesting period, and most teachers won’t stay in the system long enough to get the peak return on their investment. In Connecticut, seven out of 10 teachers will never receive the full benefit of the state’s teacher pension plan.

Teachers who change professions won’t even get credit toward social security. More and more, Connecticut’s Teachers Retirement System is out of step with today’s young workforce.

The state must reform the teacher retirement system in a way that actually helps all teachers save for their futures, provides competitive salaries and ensures proper funding for schools.

Forcing young teachers into a retirement system from which most of them won’t gain is more like a Ponzi scheme than a benefit.

So why don’t we let them choose a new one? Give each teacher the option to choose between a reformed pension plan or a new, 401(k)-style plan.

This will give the 48 percent of teachers who currently receive no benefit the opportunity to actually save for retirement. And it will ensure our benefit programs match the needs of our increasingly millennial-dominated workforce.

Millennials’ top criteria for deciding where to live is affordability, so Connecticut is already at a loss there. And they actually tend to be more responsible savers than other generations.

But they also tend to job hop more than other generations, buy homes later and start families later.

No wonder only half of teachers teach long enough to qualify for their retirement plan. A non-portable, 10-year vesting retirement plan does not support the generation that has become more mobile in lifestyle than any other generation before it.

But reforms can — and should — be made to benefit Connecticut’s young teachers as well as the state’s taxpayers.

A new Yankee Institute study released Wednesday shows how teachers, taxpayers, and school children all suffer under the state’s teacher retirement plan — which has also contributed to stagnant teacher salaries, as money is increasingly diverted from teacher paychecks to fund growing pension liabilities.

Here’s where we are:

The teacher retirement system is so underfunded that there isn’t enough money to pay teachers what has been promised to them. Pension debt payments — $31,300 for each K-12 student — now consume 75 percent of the money the state pays into the pension system.

Payments on that debt is money the state could instead direct toward municipal systems to increase teacher salaries, help troubled schools or expand programs for children.

But the pension system’s insolvency isn’t the only problem. The system’s entire structure needs reform.

If a young teacher decides to leave the profession before the 10-year mark, he or she can get a refund with interest on what they’ve already paid in, but they walk away with no social security, none of the state’s contribution toward their retirement and they can’t roll those savings into another retirement system.

Teachers must work 35 years in order to get the most benefit from the retirement system they pay into, but people — particularly millennials — rarely stay in the same career for that amount of time anymore.

A pension system that asks that of its recipients is outdated and unfair — to teachers, students and taxpayers.

Isabel Blank is the senior manager of external affairs for Yankee Institute.