It is true that the top 1 percent is pulling away very dramatically from the bottom 99 percent. “We are the 80 percent!” Not quite the same ring as “We are the 99 percent!”įor many, the most attractive class dividing line is the one between those at the very, very top and everybody else. The first task, however, is to get a sense of what’s going on.
Whether the separation is a problem is a question on which sensible people can disagree. After all, what does it matter if those at the top are flourishing? To be sure, there is a danger here of indulging in the economics of envy. Some may wonder about the moral purpose of such an exercise.
Black upper middle class series#
In a new series of Social Mobility Memos, we will examine the state of the American upper middle class: its composition, degree of separation from the majority, and perpetuation over time and across generations. Indeed, these dimensions of advantage appear to be clustering more tightly together, each thereby amplifying the effect of the other. Gaps are growing on a whole range of dimensions, including family structure, education, lifestyle, and geography. This separation is most obvious in terms of income-where the top fifth have been prospering while the majority lags behind. All rights reserved.The American upper middle class is separating, slowly but surely, from the rest of society. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Here the tuitions are reasonable, travel expenses to and from campus are low, and the student body is more likely to have peer relationships more hospitable to minority students from low-income families.Ĭopyright © 2006. But it is likely that the majority are being snapped up by academically strong and selective state universities. What about the academically strong black students from low-income families? Where are they going to college? Some indeed make their way to elite private institutions.
Black upper middle class skin#
University of Illinois professor Walter Benn Michaels put the question most bluntly when he said, “When students and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids have.” Only 9 percent of the total black population in the United States can be classified as immigrants or children of immigrants. Department of Education show that still less than one in 10 Harvard students comes from a low-income family.Ī 2004 survey of black students at 28 selective colleges and universities conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University found that 41 percent of all black students at these 28 campuses identified themselves as immigrants or children of immigrants. The latest Pell Grant numbers from the U.S. Harvard's highly publicized new financial aid program, which eliminates loans for all students who come from families with incomes under $60,000, has produced only small gains in the number of low-income students at Harvard. Karabel notes that the Big Three's preference for legacy admissions, both black and white, tends to limit economic diversity on campus. In his 2005 book The Chosen, Professor Jerome Karabel of the University of California at Berkeley has produced credible research showing that most minority students at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale come from high-income families. According to Professor Gates, more than two thirds of all Harvard's black students were either the children or grandchildren of West Indians or Africans and very few of Harvard's black students were the descendants of American slaves. That same year Professor Gates, speaking at a public forum at Princeton University, stated his belief that 75 percent of the black students at Harvard were of African or Caribbean descent or of mixed race. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard, told the London Observer, “The black kids who come to Harvard or Yale are middle class.
In a 2004 interview Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B.
Many, if not most Americans, believe that the 1960s protest movement that produced aggressive college recruitment of “ghetto kids” continues today bringing significant numbers of low-income and often underqualified blacks to America's elite campuses. Has set the pattern for others, it appears likely that most blacks currently enrolled at our elite institutions of higherĮducation come from middle- or high-income families. In the late 1960s major universities were recruiting low-income or so-called ghetto blacks. Most Black Students at Harvard Are From High-Income Families
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