ABSTRACT
While many Americans consider the USA to be a “land of opportunity,” especially in comparison to Western European countries, there is increasing awareness and greater evidence to suggest this is not the case. As the correspondents of The New York Times noted in Class Matters (2005), class has a significant impact on all aspects of US life. Class, for example, has more of an influence on who goes to elite four-year colleges than it did in the past. That is to say, the effect of social background on life-chances has grown stronger in recent years. From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, there was considerable upward social mobility and the trend was towards a decline of the effects of family background on educational and occupational attainment (Hout, 1988; Hout et al., 1993). This period was characterized by considerable affluence, the growth of higher education, the upward shift of the occupational structure towards more high-level professional and managerial jobs, and a collective commitment to equality, especially equality of opportunity. Since the late 1970s, however, the evidence suggests that upward social mobility has evened out and may even be declining (Bradbury & Katz, 2004; Scott & Leonhardt, 2005; see also Morgan et al., 2006). This period has been noted for economic troughs and accompanying redundancy and unemployment, the growth of low-level jobs in the service sector such as in retail and personal services, growing income inequality between rich and poor, and a commitment to the operation of a free market rather than alleviating inequalities. Thus, in a society where intergenerational upward social mobility may be halting, or even declining, the ways in which class inequalities are reproduced are crucial to understand.
