Many College-Educated Americans Feel Disconnected from US Middle Class
In the United States, a college education has long been one of the best ways to become a member of the middle class.
A college degree usually leads to higher pay, stronger job security, a greater chance of home ownership and comparatively secure family life. These qualities have long been seen as worth the sacrifices often required. Those sacrifices can include the money spent paying off student loans and the years waiting for a return on one’s investment in higher education.
Yet U.S. college graduates are not as likely as they once were to feel they belong to the middle class. That is a finding of the 2018 General Social Survey, or GSS.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and GSS researchers jointly examined the study. They found that 35 percent of college graduates described themselves as working or lower class. That’s an increase from 1983 when only 20 percent felt that way.
Not surprisingly, Americans without a college degree have long felt even less connected to the middle class. Last year, six in 10 of them described themselves as working or lower class, about the same as the percentage who said so in 1983. The study did not define middle class. Those questioned gave answers based on their own opinions.
The U.S. economy has been expanding for nearly 10 years. And the nation’s unemployment rate is at 3.8 percent. Yet the financial concerns that affect many college graduates point to the widening divide between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else.
Economists have noted that rising college debt has, in a way, become the cost of entrance into the job market. Nearly 80 percent of the 2 million overall job gains last year went to college graduates; just a third of U.S. adults hold a degree.
Soncia Coleman is a senior director at Young Invincibles. Her group works in support of the current generation of college-aged young people, often called millennials. Coleman said that millennials are facing difficulties like no generation before them. These difficulties are preventing them from reaching what we all consider to be the American Dream, she added.
They need the education, but the cost to get it is astronomical, said Coleman.
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