College and social class: the broken promise of America

Cross Currents, Spring, 2006 by John Raines, Charles Brian McAdams

We may begin with how wealth is distributed in our society, and how this has changed in the last thirty years since the beginning of de-industrialization. Then we can plot these wealth statistics against the income levels of the families of origin of those students who manage to graduate with a four-year college degree. Cross-referencing statistics of wealth with those of actual educational attainments will reveal how well the engine of equal opportunity, operating through schools, is working in our society, or how poorly! It will reveal how entrance into our social hierarchy is produced and reproduced from one generation to the next, and the role of education in that process.

Professional economists are agreed about the present geography of wealth, of personally owned entities of exchange value like money, stocks, houses, jewelry, and so on--although these same economists sharply disagree about the moral meaning of those statistics. The landscape of wealth looks like this. In 1980 the average CEO made 40 times the average worker in the same company. Today, twenty years later, the average CEO makes 400 times more than that average worker. (2) The Congressional Budget Office reports that from 1979 to 1997 the after tax income of the top one percent of families climbed by 157 percent, while in that same eighteen-year period middle-income Americans gained only 10 percent, and the poorest 20 percent now has debt that exceeds their assets. Today, 50 percent of the total national income goes to the richest 20 percent, while that same 20 percent get 83 percent of the country's total wealth (which, besides income, includes stocks and bonds and other private assets). That leaves just 17 percent of our nation's wealth for the remaining 80 percent of the population. (3) Middle America has become a traffic jam of frustrated hopes with the result that our national politics has become the art of deflecting anger, where people decide to vote not for a candidate but against one.

Ever since the early 1970s when de-industrialization began to take hold of our economy, the secret to wealth depended upon being one of the winners in the new globalization scramble, a scramble where most are losers. For example, during the recession of 2001-2003 three million jobs were lost. The subsequent recovery has produced many new jobs, but with this startling reality. Those who found a new job, after losing their old one, have had to settle on average for a twenty-one percent pay cut. (4) For most, the recovery has not recovered the pay they once had. We live in a nation already vastly unequal and becoming more unequal with each passing year.

Why is it so hard to talk about social class in America? In my own field of religious studies, why is it our nation's libraries are filled with books about race and religion, about gender and religion but contain almost no books on religion and social class? It is, I think, because we are a society that persistently represents itself to itself as not having the frozen inequalities of established social class but are, instead, a society energized by individual opportunity. It almost seems un-American to talk about the things we are talking about here--as if proclaiming that America contradicts what America represents itself to be.