The American Dream has become increasingly elusive for millions of people as the wealth gap in the country has grown. How can working-class Americans support their families and achieve goals like home ownership, good health care and some savings in a society that is more reliant on college degrees—out of reach for many—as a measure of success? These questions are central to Newsweek Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon's book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. In this excerpt from her book, she discusses the uphill climb workers without a college degree face in trying to reach middle-class milestones, and some solutions to the problem.
Nicole Day has never found it hard to find a job—maybe because it was never an option not to. She has always worked hard to support herself and her son. She's been a bartender, an office manager, a babysitter and a coordinator at a halfway house. But recently, she's found it impossible to find a good job. The good jobs demand a college degree, even for work that doesn't use any skills you'd pick up in college. It's happened more than once that she's been forced to train her replacement—because he had a college degree.
"If you don't have a college degree, you don't get as many opportunities," Nicole told me. "You know, I understand that, but at the same time, it's hard for people who are intelligent, who can bring something to the table."
Nicole is the victim of the growing class divide that privileges the college educated in many ways, reserving the best opportunities for them even when the jobs themselves don't require a degree. "We don't get an opportunity to show what we can do or even get looked at," she told me. "Even if someone has been with a company for five or 10 years and a position opens up, they normally hire outside of the company with someone that has a degree versus an employee that's been there for so long."
The Diploma Glass Ceiling
The diploma glass ceiling is real, and it's been exacerbated by the automation of recruiting through hiring websites. And it's been a barrier for many of the working-class people I spoke to, even the most successful ones. Skyler Adleta, an Ohio electrician, came up against it at his first real job at a paint factory when a manager position opened up. He knew his bosses liked him and thought of him as a talented guy, and they'd even implemented some of his ideas about how to streamline the work.
He went to one of the executives and said, "Hey, I'm really interested in doing this. I don't have experience in management, but I have a rapport with all the guys, they know I work hard and you guys know I care because you've seen some of my ideas implemented. If there is even any chance, I'd like to be considered."
But there was no chance. "You know it's company policy that these management-level positions require a college degree," the executive told him.
"OK. But do you think I could do it?" Skyler asked.
"As far as competence is concerned, absolutely," the executive admitted. "I think you'd be great at it. But I got a production floor of 200 employees. If I give you a management job over guys that have been here for 20 years, do you know what kind of morale issue I'm gonna have?"
"Or it could be the beginning of the guys who deserve opportunities to be encouraged," Skyler countered.
"That's not what it's going to be," the executive said.
"Well then, I'm not going to work here much longer," Skyler said.
"I don't want that to be how this conversation ends," the executive replied, but he didn't change his mind.
Skyler left a few weeks later for the trades, where a more merit-based system still prevails. Making the trades an attractive, viable, available option is one of the things I heard a lot.
Vocational training in schools, for example, used to be a mainstay in this country. Eric, a Pittsburgh elevator electrician, remembers it well. "In my senior year, the carpentry class teacher would take you to take the union test," he recalled. "They would take the whole class." It's unheard of now. "They don't promote the trades. And being a carpenter is a very good living. It ain't gonna make you rich, but it will keep you well off. You can make 80 grand a year. You can provide for your family decently."
What shifted in the intervening years was part of a national trend toward emphasizing college and the knowledge industry. This emphasis on college turned out to be little more than a sleight-of-hand to disguise the devastating impact globalization was having on the American working class. The message to working-class Americans wasn't just that they had missed the boat, but that it was their own stupidity and lack of education that resulted in the widening chasm separating them from the college educated, and that the college educated deserved their good fortune, for they had earned it.
That view very much trickled down to the working class. "You have a generation of young people who are taught that to end up in the working classes means missing the train," Skyler told me. "Essentially, if you don't go get a college degree, you're doomed or relegated to the lowest caste that exists in American society, which is the working class—or honestly, even more dehumanizing, the non-college-degreed class; I don't think they even called it anything. You're just doomed."
Between 2010 and 2016, only one job out of every 100 new jobs created was open to a worker with a high-school degree or less, and of the 11 million jobs created during those six years, three out of four required a bachelor's degree or more.
What Can Be Done?
One thing that can be done to immediately reverse this devastating trend is to eliminate college requirements for jobs that don't actually require a college education. Such an effort is actually underway, though not to the extent that it should be. Mired in a post-pandemic labor crunch, companies have started eliminating degree requirements in order to attract more applicants. Walmart is perhaps the premier example of this trend. Seventy-five percent of managers at Walmart are hired from within the ranks of store associates, and that includes higher-level managers. "There are many roles in the U.S. job market...where a college degree should not be required for career access and mobility. For example, we do not require Walmart store managers, who earned average total
compensation of approximately $230,000 in FY2023, to have a college degree," according to Walmart's website. And for jobs that require a specific skill set you learn in college, Walmart will pay for its workers to go to college.
Some states are getting rid of degree requirements, too. Pennsylvania, Utah, Colorado and Maryland have eliminated four-year college degree requirements from the majority of government jobs, and Georgia and Alaska are following suit, opening up thousands of jobs to people who had been barred from them for administrative reasons, reversing the recent trend that locked two-thirds of Americans out of jobs that don't need a college education.
I asked Nicole if she thought that would help—companies getting rid of degree requirements for positions that don't really utilize skills you learn in college. "I really, really think it would in a lot of cases," she told me. "I'm not saying every case is the same. Obviously, every company is different and there's different positions for each company. I just feel like there would be a little more opportunity. I always hear, 'You're never too old to go back to school,' and I get that, but I can't put my life on hold for four-to-eight hours a day, try to go to school and get all these student loans and debts that I'm not gonna be able to pay back." And it's especially unfair because Nicole has something a recent college grad doesn't. "I have way more experience than someone that has a college degree, but I don't have that piece of paper to show that employer that I have that college degree. Ten years' experience at that job doesn't matter."
Adapted from Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. Copyright © 2024 Batya Ungar-Sargon. Published by Encounter Books.
