Very interesting, and makes me want to read his work, but I had a hard time swallowing the definition of "upper class"/"rich" as "a group that includes (but is not necessarily limited to) anyone who attends or graduates from an elite college and has at least one parent who is a college graduate." To me, that's a solid middle/upper middle class identifier, so he's lumping middle with upper class using that definition. Upper class/rich to me has a stricter definition of wealth (and income to savings ratio) than is captured there. (Minutiae)
Thanks for reading and commenting! I'm working on a post on social class next, and I hope you'll read it and engage with it.
A small comment on your comment: unless you hold a *very* restrictive definition of upper class, there's no way "attending or graduating from an *elite* college and having at least one parent who is a college graduate" is a middle class identifier, or even an upper class identifier. The reason why is that there's just not enough of em. I started to put this in a footnote and dropped it, but there are only about 15-18 million college students in the U.S. each year. Even if you add up the top 50 national universities and the top 50 liberal arts colleges (by US News or any other definition), you don't crack more than a couple percentage points *of college attendees*, who are already not the median high school graduate.
That said, I happen to agree that, operationally, when we talk about class, we should be talking a lot about income and/or wealth. So I hope you like the next post!
Very interesting, and makes me want to read his work, but I had a hard time swallowing the definition of "upper class"/"rich" as "a group that includes (but is not necessarily limited to) anyone who attends or graduates from an elite college and has at least one parent who is a college graduate." To me, that's a solid middle/upper middle class identifier, so he's lumping middle with upper class using that definition. Upper class/rich to me has a stricter definition of wealth (and income to savings ratio) than is captured there. (Minutiae)
Thanks for reading and commenting! I'm working on a post on social class next, and I hope you'll read it and engage with it.
A small comment on your comment: unless you hold a *very* restrictive definition of upper class, there's no way "attending or graduating from an *elite* college and having at least one parent who is a college graduate" is a middle class identifier, or even an upper class identifier. The reason why is that there's just not enough of em. I started to put this in a footnote and dropped it, but there are only about 15-18 million college students in the U.S. each year. Even if you add up the top 50 national universities and the top 50 liberal arts colleges (by US News or any other definition), you don't crack more than a couple percentage points *of college attendees*, who are already not the median high school graduate.
That said, I happen to agree that, operationally, when we talk about class, we should be talking a lot about income and/or wealth. So I hope you like the next post!