Economix Blog: Who Makes It Into the Middle Class

A new study by researchers at the Brookings Institution shows that about two in three Americans achieves a middle-class lifestyle by middle age — and delves deeply into who makes it there and how.

Isabel V. Sawhill, Scott Winship and Kerry Searle Grannis tackled the question of why some children make it to the middle class and others do not, studying criteria that tend to be indicative of later economic success and examining how race, gender and family income come into play.

The study breaks life down into stages (for instance, adolescence) and gives benchmarks for each of those stages (in that case, graduation from high school with a grade-point average above 2.5, no criminal convictions and no involvement in a teenage pregnancy).

They then studied children over time, analyzing whether they met those benchmarks and projecting whether they would make it to the middle class — defined as the top three quintiles of income — by age 40.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that success seems to beget success — meeting each benchmark makes one more likely to meet the next. Moreover, the effect accumulates. A child who meets all the criteria from birth to adulthood has an 81 percent chance of being middle class. A child who meets none has only a 24 percent chance.

(Notably, at each stage of life, a person who failed to meet the given criteria had as high as a 59 percent chance of meeting them in the next round.)

The researchers also found that a number of other factors significantly influenced a person’s likelihood of making it to the middle class.

Family wealth, for instance, matters a lot. The researchers show that children born to rich families have a 75 percent chance of being middle income or better by the time they reach their 40s. For children born to poor families, the chance is just 40 percent.

Children from disadvantaged families are less likely to be ready for school at age 5, less likely to be competent elementary-school students, less likely to graduate from high school without a criminal record or a child, and so on.

Race matters as well. About two in five black adolescents met the benchmark of graduating from high school with a decent grade point average, no children and no criminal record by the age of 19. About two in three white adolescents did.

The researchers also compared boys’ and girls’ outcomes. They found that girls are more likely to meet the given benchmarks through childhood, but they lose ground later in life. Boys become as likely to meet the benchmarks as girls do by the time they are in their late 20s, and pull ahead by their 40s.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/who-makes-it-into-the-middle-class/?partner=rss&emc=rss