WORK
Working-class Americans are increasingly unable to qualify for good jobs, despite experience and skills
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
