The unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher is 5 percent. If that were the rate for everyone, it’d be the 1990s again. But college graduates are only 30 percent of the country. For the rest of the population, the jobs picture is grimmer. For people without a high-school degree, the unemployment rate is more than 15 percent. If that were the rate for everyone, it’d be the 1930s again.Lowery goes on to explain why this spells disaster for the middle class, but the reasons aren't difficult to see. As the middle class adopts the social values of the underclass it gravitates toward the underclass leaving us with a socioeconomic hourglass society, a bulge at the upper and lower ends with little in between. Moreover, the difference between the two classes becomes enormous with one valuing marriage, education and work and the other indifferent to them.
But unemployment is only part of the difference between the well-educated and the moderately educated.
University of Virginia scholar Brad Wilcox details how the college-educated have embraced traditional mores and habits — especially the formation of stable families — while they erode among everyone else.
Our elites, broadly defined as the top third of our society, aren’t nearly as decadent as advertised. According to Wilcox’s data, the highly educated (with a college diploma or higher) are less likely to divorce, less likely to have children out of wedlock, and less likely to commit adultery than the moderately educated (high-school degree or some college) and the least-educated (no high-school diploma).
The moderately educated might be called the lower-middle class or upper-working class. Wilcox refers to them as the “solid middle”: “They are not upscale, but they are not poor. They don’t occupy any of the margins, yet they are often overlooked, even though they make up the largest share of the American middle class.” He documents an equally disturbing separation between the top and the rest, and a convergence between the middle and the bottom.
In the 1970s, 73 percent of both the highly and moderately educated were in intact first marriages. That figure plummeted across the board, yet the moderately educated (45 percent in intact first marriages) are now closer to the least-educated (39 percent) than to the highly educated (56 percent).
The number for out-of-wedlock births is starker. From 1982 until today, the percentage of non-marital births among the moderately educated exploded from 13 percent to 44 percent. That figure is close to the least-educated (54 percent) and a vast distance from the highly educated (only 6 percent). Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation compares the dynamic to a carpet unraveling from the bottom, as illegitimacy first took hold among the poor and now works up the income scale.
As long as single parenthood and lack of education were confined to the very poor, it was a tragedy, but it wasn't a calamity for the rest of society. If these dysfunctions continue to spread through the middle class, however, it will mean the end of the American dream. It's not hard to imagine that we'll eventually come to look, in relative socio-economic terms, like the France of 1788.