What’s Next

This chapter discusses the book’s unanswered questions, reveals the myths the book shattered, and explains the implications of the findings for parents, youth, policy makers, and voters.

Explorers

Youth who grow up with conflicting influences from their resources and communities tend to identify as explorers—those who hold multiple identities at once. This causes them to vacillate between various goals rather than to focus on one. Those who vacillate between goals that lead them to become a professional or marry one tend to reproduce their class position. Others pursue goals that take them away from resource acquisition, leading them onto downwardly mobile paths.

Artists and Athletes

Youth with more human and cultural capital than economic capital tend to identify as artists and athletes. These identities hold that individuals should follow their passion rather than following the money—making it seem virtuous that their families have little money compared to those in their class. However, by following their passion without thinking about money, they do not realize that there are few full-time jobs in the arts or in sports. They then graduate from college and struggle to find a professional job—putting them on the path toward downward mobility.

Stay-at-Home Mothers

Women who identify as stay-at-home mothers have only one option for class reproduction: through marriage. Most college-educated professional men now marry college-educated women. Women raised with college-educated mothers tend to receive enough academic and institutional knowledge from their mothers to graduate from college, marry a college-educated professional, and reproduce their class position. Women raised without college-educated mothers tend to inherit less academic and institutional knowledge and struggle with or reject college. Wanting to become stay-at-home mothers, they marry young—but to working-class men who further their slide out of the upper-middle class.

Exceptions

Previous chapters focused on youth whose identities followed from their resources, making identities and resources difficult to separate. This chapter examines individuals whose resources and identities are misaligned as well as those whose resources or identities dramatically changed. These stories show that resources and identities each relate to downward mobility. Among those with the same resource inheritances, identities relate to who falls. And among those with the same identities, resources relate to who falls. Moreover, when inherited resources change, identities and then mobility pathways sometimes change as well. And when identities alone change, mobility pathways tend to change too.

Rebels

Men raised in liberal communities with low levels of academic and institutional knowledge see no institution that will reward them. In liberal communities, early marriage is frowned upon, and they did not receive the resources that would give them status in school, college, or work. They respond by becoming rebels—by repeatedly breaking institutional rules. This identity does not thwart their ability to stay in the upper-middle class at first, but it does after they graduate from college. Most become unemployed or underemployed—and begin to fall out of their original social class.

Family Men

There are two types of family men: those raised in conservative communities and with resource strengths, and those raised with resource weaknesses who use the identity to make a virtue of necessity. The former distances themselves from school, college, and work but maintain enough resources to remain insecurely tied to the upper-middle class. The latter distances themselves from school, college, and work too. However, having started with fewer resources, they are unable to stay in the upper-middle class. Still, most are pleased with how their lives unfold: they are on route to marrying, becoming fathers, and providing—becoming the family men they’ve long wanted to be.

The Downwardly Mobile

Downward mobility is common, but we know little about who falls from the upper-middle class, how, and why they don’t see it coming. This chapter provides an overview of how intergenerational downward mobility occurs. It shows that both resources and identities are associated with downward mobility from the upper-middle class. Individuals who inherit relatively high levels of academic knowledge, institutional insights, and money tend to develop an identity that leads them to maintain high levels of these resources. They use these resources to reproduce their class position. Individuals who inherit relatively low levels of academic knowledge, institutional insights, or money tend to develop an identity that encourages them to maintain their resource weaknesses. Without the resources that schools, colleges, and professional workplaces reward, they tend to enter downwardly mobile trajectories. They do not necessarily anticipate their impending downward mobility as they observe times when they or their parents moved toward class reproduction while not having high levels of these resources.

Professionals

About half of youth born into the upper-middle class remain in it as adults. This chapter shows how this occurs. Youth who inherit high levels of human, cultural, and economic capital form a professional identity that encourages them to maintain their resource strengths. With these resources, they reproduce their class position.