The Hollow Middle Class

Think about your household’s monthly expenses. There are the big-ticket items — your rent or mortgage, your health care, maybe a student loan. Then there’s the smaller stuff: the utility bills; the internet and phone bills; Netflix, Hulu, and all your other streaming subscriptions. If you drive a car, there’s gas and insurance. If you take the subway, there’s a public transit pass. You pay for food, and household items like toilet paper and garbage bags and lightbulbs. You buy furniture and sheets and dishes.

Now imagine paying for all those things completely on your own.

When Laura sent me an email in early August, the first thing she did was apologize. “Please excuse how inelegant and disjointed this will be,” she wrote. “It matches my brain after being a caregiver since 2013.”

In 2013, Laura was several decades into a career as a marketing consultant. Her work was rewarding and challenging; she felt like she got to be creative every day and was never bored. She had gone freelance in the early 2000s and reveled in the freedom of being her own boss. Then her 78-year-old mom began experiencing severe back pain. She was scheduled for surgery, but the symptoms only worsened after the procedure. She was soon rushed back to the hospital following the collapse of her spinal cord. After emergency surgery, her pain lessened, at least somewhat, but then Laura was left to deal with her mom’s quickly accelerating dementia. “She went from normal cognition to thinking it was her wedding day and that I was her mother,” Laura told me. “She didn’t know how to walk, and didn’t remember what had happened to her.”

Over the past 40 years, the prospect of achieving or maintaining a foothold in the middle class has faded for millions of Americans. Blame stagnant wages, the ever-increasing cost of living, massive student debt, and the narrowing of once all-but-guaranteed routes — like, say, a good union job — to economic stability. Millennials, as a whole, are the first generation predicted to be worse off than their parents. A 2017 study found that a staggering 90 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents did at age 30; for children born in 1984, that percentage has declined to just 50 percent.

But there’s a complicated, competing reality at work for recent immigrants to the United States and their children, the majority of whom are currently living some version of the American dream. Or, more precisely, the upward mobility component of that dream: the idea that hard work will lead to increased stability and class position for the next generation.

When I graduated from college in the mid-2000s, I moved to Seattle to find a job waitressing. After weeks of handing over résumés, I was still unemployed. Then I saw an advertisement in the local alt-weekly for a teacher’s assistant position at a preschool, just across the street from the University of Washington. I’d babysat, usually for around $2 an hour, since fifth grade. Infants, toddlers, 4-year-olds: I’d spent endless hours with them all, sometimes all at once, sometimes even overnight. I had great references. I got the job, which paid $8 an hour — just over the state’s then-minimum wage of $7.16 — almost instantly.

In the toddler room, where kids were between 1 and 2 years old, another teacher and I handled the care of a dozen squawking, endlessly curious kids. The job, as anyone who’s worked in a child care center or preschool can tell you, is incredibly physical; I was sore every night in some new way.

Pieces like this almost always start with someone’s student debt story. Here’s a person who wanted to go to college — they’d always dreamed of a career that required it, or they had just internalized the idea that college was the only route to success. Their parents hadn’t saved enough to cover the costs, but when they filled out their FAFSA, a solution to their problems presented itself: an abundance of student loans, no questions asked. It was a no-brainer! College was the way to a better future, and student loans were what you needed for college.

That’s the first act of the story. In the second act, the student has graduated from college. Maybe they struggled to find a job, and convinced themselves that the real route was grad school. They took out more loans for law school, or med school, or architecture school; maybe they figured out they wanted to teach, and needed to get a master’s degree to do so. Someone might have told them about the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program: If they spent a decade, post-graduation, working in a field that qualified as public service and made regular, income-based repayments on their loans, the rest of the balance would be forgiven.

Among Dee’s friends, talking about money is considered impolite. But that’s not really what stops her. “Most of my peers are white,” she says, “and I get very angry about the systemic inequality evident in our situations, and their seeming obliviousness to it.”

Dee’s family has been middle-class and college-educated going back three generations, “since Black people reasonably could be,” she says. Her maternal grandparents were the children of sharecroppers in the South, migrated north as adults, got graduate degrees, and, unlike millions of Black Americans who were unable to secure mortgages at the time due to racist housing covenants and lending practices, bought a home.

Delia did everything right. She went to college, she got a teaching degree, she found a reliable job, and she got married. She and her husband had two kids. “We followed the traditional path to middle class and economic security,” she told me. “Or so I thought.”

As a teacher in New Jersey, Delia, age 41, makes around $115,000 a year; her husband, who works as a carpenter, makes $45,000. Their $160,000 combined family salary places them firmly in the American middle class, the boundaries of which are considered to be two-thirds of the US median household income on the lowest end and double that same median on the highest, and adjusted for location. (According to the Pew Middle Class Calculator, Delia’s household income places her family in the “middle tier” along with 49 percent of households in the greater tri-state area.)