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"middle-class life to those without a college degree" Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important

• jnbiche 8y ago
  > It turned out, college was partly a proxy for class. What college grad earnings in the 60s was actually saying is that upper-middle class kids grow into upper-middle class adults. I think this is a critical observation that lots of people--including some economists--have missed.
  • abakker 8y ago
    I've heard this said in another, less correct way: "the real number of 1960s equivalent college graduates has never changed, its just become harder to find them based on a label". But, broadly, I've heard a lot of acknowledgement for this. If the education is right, but the cultural trappings are not, then suddenly the education isn't the issue.
  • sudosteph 8y ago
    A college degree may not be a panacea for class mobility, but lets not forget that class mobility without a degree is pretty much not possible in the slightest. Per a Pew study Brookings cites (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2014/02/11/does-college-really-improve-social-mobility/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2014/02...): > children born in the lowest income quintile who do not earn a four-year degree are four times as likely to wind up in the bottom (47%) as those who earn a four-year degree (10%). So while upper middle class people are still the ones with the best chance at getting admitted, paying for, and finishing college degrees, lower class people who persist and do the same really are far more likely to join the middle or upper middle class from doing the same. Though it's far from guaranteed, especially since the relative value of a degree does depend on which degree, and sometimes school prestige as well, which is definitely harder for the lower class to prioritize (costs, scholarship availability, and nearness to family if they need to provide income support or other support to them tend to matter more in my experience). The observation you mention is accurate, but I just wanted to provide additional context to readers who may not realize the life changing effect a degree can still have for poor people. This is as someone who experienced a comfortable middle class upbringing only because of the combination of a state school in the rural south that gave merit scholarships in the 80s to locals, and my mom's efforts to graduate with a degree that would be worth money. That said, the idea of pursuing liberal arts in college is still incredibly foreign to me. Being able to support oneself after getting that sort of degree is definitely something I can see as mostly a proxy for upper middle class upbringing, and likely feeds into the rising trends see today where the payoff for the lower class is not hugely significant or comparable to well connected peers, even upon degree completion.
    • tbrownaw 8y ago
      ...A 53% chance is "pretty much not possible in the slightest"?
      • sudosteph 8y ago
        Did you look at the graph that article linked? Do you think that moving from the first income quintile into the second one is genuine class mobility? People in the second quintile income range may not be relying on food stamps, but for most of America that's still a less than a comfortable situation, one that's still in the territory of living nearly paycheck-to-paycheck (23% of americans have no savings, and another 22% have less than 3 months worth), and it's not going to buy you many advantages in living situations or education opportunity for kids either. Of the ones without college degrees, 26% of that 53% you're calling out still ended up in that bracket. So again, without a college degree, there's a 73% of people born poor, will remain lower or low-middle class. Only 3% will make it into the top quintile (vs 9% with degrees) and 8% into the 4th (vs 17% with degrees). So if we define only as 3rd quintile up as middle and up (which is questionable in itself given the shrinking middle class) a degree lands a lower-class person 52% chance of genuine upwards mobility, compared to 27% without. And it nearly guarantees that they at least won't remain in the very worst stratum of poverty. 52% for real mobility may not be great odds, but neither is 27% and if it was my future on the line, I definitely would not want to be staking it on 27%.
    • randomdata 8y ago
      > lets not forget that class mobility without a degree is pretty much not possible in the slightest. While it is true that the school system acts as a filter that removes those who have almost no chance of upward mobility (those with crippling disabilities, for example) from completing higher and higher levels of schooling, we need to be careful to not reverse that observation. Attaining a degree is not going to undo the disability that limits one's economic growth. With the great push for everyone to have a post-secondary education we've witnessed over the last decade or two, virtually everyone who is capable of attaining a post-secondary education has done so. Those who are not completing those levels of schooling now are those who had no chance in the first place, and they struggle equally in the rest of their life for the same reason they did not succeed in school. That said, if you were born with what it takes to be top of the class in Harvard, but chose not to pursue that avenue of life, chances are you still have every bit of upward mobility potential as someone who did graduate from Harvard.
• Bucephalus355 8y ago
  You make very good points above. I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes. That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive? If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you’d receive a written offer for 100k plus within days from my current company (in Texas so that’s quite a bit of money). Again don’t think colleges are going to compete well against that. Last thing, here in Texas high schools can now issue Associate Degrees usually. Also the whole model of high school has shifted from test-focused to job-placement focus. Starting this year you can get an Associates in cybersecurity out of high school...
  • YawningAngel 8y ago
    Who on earth employs a "solutions architect" whose only qualification is some random certificate that tests AWS trivia?
    • halbritt 8y ago
      Backwater IT orgs deep in the heart of Texas that have heard that they have to move everything into the cloud?
      • deboflo 8y ago
        No, startups in Silicon Valley are starting to look at these certs because they realize how expensive poorly configured cloud infrastructure can be. It’s a skill that few people have at this point.
        • halbritt 8y ago
          As a hiring manager for an infrastructure engineering team in a startup in the Silicon Valley, I have some opinion about the value of these certs. I'd likely never hire an engineer with one of these certs and no relevant experience into a full-time position. I might offer an internship, but that's not a six-figure position.
• SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  > I'm also dubious about college as a proxy for skill, in the skilled labour sense. A lot of college is very general education, with even less focus on marketable skills than high school. At one time there was an argument that general skills had value. We as a society have become super specialized and those general skills relatively ubiquitous that those general skills aren't terribly valued any more. Your employer doesn't care if you understand Cartesian philosophy or having an understanding of classical rhetoric, they just want to see you spent 4 years learning accounting/law/human resources because those are the skills that's required. This may also be why our leaders have gone from "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." to "We love winners. We love winners. Winners are winners." in the last century.
  • Retric 8y ago
    Jobs have become less specialized not more. Being able to effectively communicate over email takes more writing skills than most people assume. The internet adds a lot of flexibility in the kind of things the average office worker will do.
    • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      > Jobs have become less specialized not more. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2012/01/31/the-end-of-a-job-as-we-know-it/#5782c6bb16aa https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2012/01/31/the-end-o... https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-big-idea-the-age-of-hyperspecialization https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-big-idea-the-age-of-hyperspecial... http://theconversation.com/want-a-job-its-still-about-education-83064 http://theconversation.com/want-a-job-its-still-about-educat... The general consensus I can see is that that is not the case - employers want specialties. And absolutely communication is a skill we require, but for some reason it's not valued.
    • rlabrecque 8y ago
      I disagree with that first part. At least in software engineering. Remember when you just had software engineers? Eventually we got things like game programmers and web developers. Now every game has at the very least an audio programmer, gameplay programmers, network programmers, graphics programmers, platform engineers, etc. Web Developers are even more specialized, walk into any web development shop and you can find people that only ever work with say React on mobile, or one person that specializes on browser compatibility, or analytics engineering. Part of it is the size and scope of the projects and the general complexity added to the field, but 20 years ago 1-2 people would have done all of these.
• nradov 8y ago
  College doesn't necessarily make people more productive. Rather it acts as a filter to knock unproductive people out of the hiring pool. And in economics terminology, completing a degree acts as a signal for candidates to demonstrate intelligence and persistence to employers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
  • wbl 8y ago
    There are varying extents to which signalling is a good explanation and employers have more fine grained information then just degree or not. As usual the literature is less univocal.
  • landryraccoon 8y ago
    I don’t buy this. Are saying if you get college a degree in Chemical Engineering you wouldn’t be far more productive as a Chemical Engineer than if you only went to high school? Or in say, physics or chemistry or botany?
    • rafiki6 8y ago
      No the commenter is saying that having completed a degree in chemical engineering serves as a signal to your productivity. It does not in fact determine how productive you actually are.
      • logfromblammo 8y ago
        Observation: college graduates are more productive laborers in the work force. Hypothesis A: college coursework actually increases a student's future work productivity. Hypothesis B: the least productive laborers are unable to be admitted to a college, or unable to graduate. The admissions and graduation filters thus raise the productivity average in the pool of graduates. Hypothesis C: businesses with the most productive workers tend to prefer college graduates. Workers without degrees appear to be less productive because the only jobs available to them have inherently lower productivity. Hypothesis D: productivity is measured differently for some workers, based in part on whether they have college degrees. Hypothesis E: some workers are able to influence the measurement of productivity, such that productivity originating from other workers is reassigned to them, and those cheating workers tend to have degrees. Hypothesis F: workers with degrees tend to have debts, and are forced by necessity to be more productive in order to first pay them off, and then later save enough for retirement with a shorter savings window. Hypothesis G: workers with degrees are more productive because the past correlation generates an expectation that they be more productive. The observation could have complex cause, and all of the above may be true.
• cimmanom 8y ago
  Only a couple generations ago, college was not a proxy for "middle class". Lots of blue-collar jobs (especially industrial ones) paid enough for a "middle class" lifestyle and financial security. Small businesses were competitive and many of their owners were not college educated either. College wasn't a necessary qualification for most blue-collar jobs, including some for which it now is (such as police work, in many places) or even for many entry-level white-collar jobs - you could start out as a file clerk with a high school degree and work your way up into middle or even upper management (at least if you were white and male).
  • mschuster91 8y ago
    > you could start out as a file clerk with a high school degree and work your way up into middle or even upper management (at least if you were white and male). That upwards mobility depends on one thing: that old people drop out of the workforce either by death or by pension, so that young people can rise up the ranks. Now, given that people in their 80s need to work (!) to survive, this "generational contract" is broken. People are stuck with shit jobs until well in their 30s, so how are they supposed to procreate or save for their own retirement?
    • cimmanom 8y ago
      Or that employment is growing rather than shrinking - but I absolutely agree.
    • graeme 8y ago
      This is the lump of labour fallacy. Rest assured that life will be harder for young people if a sizeable portion of the population is old, out of the labour force, and needs to be supported by a rising share of taxes from a small number of young workers. We should hope that older works stay in jobs as long as they're able. The coming demographic bulge isn't pretty.
      • njarboe 8y ago
        The old people in America now own the majority of the assets. If they transfer those assets to the young in exchange for work, things will get better. If the old are split into those that have a huge amount of money and spend a little percent of it in retirement, passing the rest onto their heirs, and a large number of old people that need to keep working just to survive, locking out the young people from moving up, there will be trouble. Unfortunately it seems like the latter is happening at the moment.
• purplezooey 8y ago
  eh splitting hairs a bit. In a recent span of 5 years we had 150k new jobs and built 14k new housing units (sfba).
• andrewla 8y ago
  Part of the problem here when discussing specifics and trends like this is that we use a term like "middle class" to mean two things; either the simple middle quantile (1/3 or 1/5 or 3/5 depending on who you talk to) of income or the more historical definition of less-than-upper-class (those people who do not need to work; who have sufficient capital that they can live off of passive income from it) and more-than-working-class (those who have to work; who do not have sufficient income to accrue savings). And even the more-than-working-class definition clashes with other trends; some pundits seem to define "working class" as nothing more than "does not have a college degree", which means that some trends, rather than being interesting demographically, instead just become a restatement of an underlying trend (like you said, the increased prevalence of college degrees). And the final problem of all attempts to analyze this is that we don't really have comprehensive data that supports a single way of measuring these aspects historically, because the definitions and criteria keep changing. Even when there is insightful research, it really is hard for it to be applicable outside its direct area because the definitions and proxies for historical values are not guaranteed to be uncorrelated with new phenomena that are attempting to be measured.
• e40 8y ago
  A lot has been written about people with college degrees working at Starbucks, having a lot of student loan debt, and never being able to save for retirement. So, I agree, have a college degree is only a proxy for skill if that degree is in something that is marketable. Comp Lit is not marketable, hence the reason a lot of people at Starbucks have degrees.
  • hindsightbias 8y ago
    They could have started at Starbucks and gotten the degree for free from ASU online. https://www.starbucks.com/careers/working-at-starbucks/education https://www.starbucks.com/careers/working-at-starbucks/educa...
• diogenescynic 8y ago
  The other side of the coin is that college has become increasingly more and more expensive and there are now many times more people with bachelors degrees, so college is no longer the sure path to middle class it once was.
• rafiki6 8y ago
  Sure, I'm not sure anyone actually denies this. College education was something only upper class folks could receive (especially a liberal arts degree with dubious value in society) due to it's expense. With the emergence of things like state schools, the barrier became lower. But the fact of the matter is higher paying jobs required college degrees, and the best chance for most people at a middle class lifestyle are those jobs. Well now, wages have stagnated for most jobs, the true value of a non-STEM college degree has becoming glaringly obvious, and opportunities for people to maintain a middle-class lifestyle are rapidly declining. The MBA has been serving as that proxy for how upper class you are especially from expensive prestigious universities. When the highest value of a degree is "the opportunity to network" that should tell you something. Now with the pressures of off-shoring manufacturing, automation, and growing immigrant populations willing to do low-skilled labor to survive, is it really at all surprising that many people are being shut out of the economy? It all comes down to a fundamentally broken economic model that values growth above all. Our population grew in tandem with our economy. Once automation of manufacturing processes took hold, we quickly started to need less people. The reality is we probably don't need 7 billion humans anymore, and we need to transition to a more efficient sustainable economic model that isn't aiming for growth above all.
  • robhunter 8y ago
    > College education was something only upper class folks could receive (especially a liberal arts degree with dubious value in society) due to it's expense. With the emergence of things like state schools, the barrier became lower. This is not factually correct - tuition at non-state schools increased 10X in the last 30 years, way ahead of the pace of inflation. College education is significantly much less affordable than it was years ago.
    • rsync 8y ago
      >> "College education was something only upper class folks could receive ... due to it's expense." > "This is not factually correct - tuition at non-state schools increased 10X in the last 30 years, way ahead of the pace of inflation." You are only considering the monetary cost of college which has, indeed, skyrocketed. However a more significant cost in the era you are both speaking of was the cost of not working immediately after high school - especially when that same social class very likely had started a family, or had a family they were coming from that needed support. People coming from a high SES background could afford four years of non-earning, etc.
• thaumasiotes 8y ago
  A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people? http://www.unz.com/anepigone/average-iq-of-college-undergrads-and-graduate-degree-holders-by-decade/ http://www.unz.com/anepigone/average-iq-of-college-undergrad... > Today’s bachelor’s degree is the equivalent of a high school graduation certificate from fifty years ago, and today’s graduate degree falls short of a bachelor’s degree from a generation ago.
• ivalm 8y ago
  >Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people? According to this [0] article from 2017 only 33.4% of Americans over the age of 25 have finished their undergraduate education. As such, MOST people are still without undergraduate education, and thus a median American does not have undergrad education. Since middle class should represent a median resident, it would follow that people without undergrad education should be quite solidly in the middle class. [0] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/326995-census-more-americans-have-college-degrees-than-ever-before https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/326995-census-more-...
  • dan-robertson 8y ago
    I don’t think middle class refers to median income. At least it certainly didn’t used to. How else could a population have a small middle class? I don’t think the answer is by having equally large upper and working classes.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > I don’t think middle class refers to median income. At least it certainly didn’t used to. How else could a population have a small middle class? Well, it could if it meant “near median income” if few had near the median income. Median doesn't mean particularly common (or even the most common, which is the mode.)
      • dan-robertson 8y ago
        The median is what you get if you sort all people by income and pick the middle person. If one forces the median to be in the middle class then this forces the upper class to be large when the middle is small: Example with a large middle class: |...|...........|...| ^ ^ ^ | median | (working) (upper) Example with small middle class: |.......|...|.......| ^ ^ ^ | median | (working) (upper) Real life example with small middle class: |.............|...|.| (working) ^ ^ ^ median | (upper) middle
• danans 8y ago
  The American term "middle-class" means something far less specific than the original British meaning of "well to do, town dwelling, non-aristocratic business owner". In that definition, a "middle-class" person is never an employee (which would make someone "working-class"). The American use of the term reflects (whether or not it is borne out in reality) the achievement of a comfortable and secure lifestyle (relative to the current time period) by an employee. In a way, it's a more flexible definition than the British one. The post WWII economic boom was the first time that, en-masse, people who were not inheritors of significant educational or monetary capital or status could achieve that lifestyle. However, the problem with the American definition is that it chooses to ignore how much that achievement actually has to do with class and other inertial societal constructs, perhaps because frank discussion of class effects is still considered taboo in American society, whereas older societies with openly acknowledged class structures can actually have that discussion.
  • cat199 8y ago
    well put it also helps us to conveniently ignore economic sovereignty when contemplating 'success' or 'prosperity' which of course is a useful frame given the bulk of the post war american middle class was created by essentially trading economic sovereignty in the form of small farms for corporatism not sure how it could have developed otherwise given the rise of factory farms, etc, but this direction was certainly influenced by large players as well..
  • hoaw 8y ago
    The most concise modern class definition I have seen goes something like this: Working class: work to survive. Middle class: work to do other things. Upper middle class: work for wealth. Upper class: work optional. People rightfully like to talk about the working poor and the disappearing middle class, but I think we are actually already past that. What we are seeing now is that between education, housing and financial insecurity it is hard to be even upper middle class anymore without existing wealth.
    • nostrademons 8y ago
      "What we are seeing now is that between education, housing and financial insecurity it is hard to be even upper middle class anymore without existing wealth." I'm not sure that's really true - or at least, it's an incomplete model. Rather, what's happening with education, health care, & housing is that you have three sectors with flat productivity growth and large barriers to entry, which implies that the number of people they can serve remains constant. The population is growing. When you can provide a service to X people but there are Y > X people who need that service, Y - X people will necessarily end up going without. The financial insecurity is because of the mad scramble to avoid being part of the Y - X who get left out in this game of musical chairs. The reason the middle class (using danan's definition of "employees with a comfortable and secure lifestyle") expanded so much after WW2 was because we had a number of technological breakthroughs that dramatically increased the productivity of these sectors. Antibiotics and vaccines meant that illnesses which previously would kill or require long medical care could be prevented by a simple shot. The green revolution increased the yields on crops by 10x. The interstate highway system and automobile opened up vast suburban areas for development, and developers (like our current president's father) became wealthy applying mass-production techniques to building housing. The number of skilled scientists in the U.S. increased dramatically during WW2 as they left turmoil in the rest of the world, which could support larger college populations. We still see those technological breakthroughs in other areas like computers & media, but they don't happen anymore in fundamental areas of life like health care & education. Some of this is probably inherent in the problem domain (with all the easy diseases cured, we now die of heart disease, cancer, suicide, overdoses, etc, most of which have proven stubbornly resistant to cures) while some is because of artificial restrictions (like housing zoning laws).
• ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  College is fundamentally a positional good - many job markets will preferentially hire applicants with a college degree over those without, particularly for well-paying and white-collar jobs. What the college graduate earnings indicate is that the people you are willing to preferentially hire end up making more money. When you have more college graduates, this preferential hiring effect is less significant, since you're now looking at the top X% of jobs rather than the top Y% of 50 years ago.
• travisoneill1 8y ago
  Right. Your credential only has value because other people don't have it. Increase the supply of degree holders and the value of the degree drops. If I made this statement about any other economic commodity it would be called obvious, but for some reason people don't get it with education.
• Bartweiss 8y ago
  > Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people? An interesting touchstone for the article: high-rent cities in the US have started to see restaurant turnover not from 'normal' financial failures but from labor shortages. For midrange restaurants that aren't either selling luxury or exploiting captive demand (e.g. lunch for nearby offices), there's no price point where they can make ends meet while paying servers, dishwashers, etc enough to accept high rents and/or long commutes. I agree that treating "non-college" as a constant bracket is a misleading measure, and I can complain all day about the spread of overpriced credentialism in hiring. But observationally at least, I think there's a separate issue with big cities and low-skilled labor where work we consider part of "normal functioning" for our society is increasingly incompatible with the housing prices and transit options available around urban centers.
  • Mikeb85 8y ago
    Re. failing restaurants, that's a result of bad business planning. If you can't find staff, pay more, pass those costs on to customers. If people can afford to live in high-rent areas, they can afford to pay more for food.
    • Bartweiss 8y ago
      I don't disagree, exactly - I'm strongly opposed to most rent-control measures other than scrapping protectionist zoning rules. But I do think can versus will is a thorny question. Restaurant and delivery dining are highly elastic in general, and big cities aren't necessarily an exception. People who can stably afford to live in downtown SF, NYC, LA, Boston, etc. are still frequently paying >33% of income in rent, and ~50% isn't shocking for younger people. As a result, you've got a major demographic that's relatively high-income but still tight on cash and consequently price sensitive. (More speculatively, I think there's also a grain of truth to the "avocado toast" thing; young urbanites seem likely to cut back on purchase frequency before they cut back on quality.) So it's not necessarily the case that restaurants can make things work by raising prices; there's no rule saying that a given type of restaurant has to be viable at any price point. I realize that we can label all of this as free markets doing their thing; maybe mid-tier restaurants with lots of staff are just an inefficient use of valuable urban space. But real estate is infamously messy, and there are some interesting questions about whether city rents would be more functional if not for the conversion of usable space into artificial demand (e.g. mandatory parking with housing) and disused investment space. And even if that's not the case, it's still news if we've built a market where "going out for dinner" is no longer a standard transaction.