Published by the Associated Press.
A college degree has long been a ticket to the U.S. middle class.
Yet college graduates aren’t as likely as they once were to feel they belong to the middle class, according to a collaborative analysis of the 2018 General Social Survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and GSS staff. The survey found that 35% of graduates described themselves as working or lower class, up from just 20% who felt that way in 1983. By contrast, only 64% of college grads say they feel they belong to the middle or upper class.
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 proportion who said so in 1983. (The survey didn’t define middle class; respondents replied based on their own perceptions.)
The income disparities go well beyond the gap between the top 1% of earners and all other households. Disparities are widening even within many occupations, including financial advisers, lawyers and physicians. The result is that an ostensibly middle class job title may provide a pay level more associated with a lower middle class job.
But Americans are also more likely than they were before the recession to say they feel overworked. College graduates are likelier than those without degrees to say they work overtime (80% to 70 and that they have more work to do than they can complete (40% to 30%).
Now a portfolio manager for a mortgage servicing company, he says his income-based loan repayment plan isn’t enough to fully cover the interest on his loans. So his debt load keeps rising even though Provo is making his regular loan payments. Just last week, he received a real estate license in hopes of earning extra income to reduce his debts.
All told, student debt totals roughly $1.5 trillion — a more than five-fold increase since 2004, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. To help manage the burden, many parents and older family members have borrowed to fund their children’s educations.
Economists have noted that rising college debt has in effect become an entry fee for the job market. Nearly 80% of the net 2 million job gains last year went to college graduates, even though just a third of adults hold a degree. But roughly 60% of college graduates in 2017 had student loans, with the average borrower leaving college with about $30,000 in debt, according to the College Board.
What’s more, disparities in pay have widened within individual job categories over the past decade, according to an analysis by Martha Gimbel, research director at Indeed.com, the jobs site. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gimbel studied the gap between what the top 10% of a profession earned compared with the bottom 10%.
The top 10% of America’s lawyers earned more than $208,000 last year, which makes the profession look extremely lucrative. But the bottom 10% earned less than $58,200, an income that could make it difficult to repay law school debt