6.3c Social Class

Sociologists study social class, a form of stratification based on the relationship between a person’s characteristics such as educational credentials, resources including income and other capital, and occupation or placement in the labor market (see Wright, 2015). Common social class categories include poor, lower-class, working class, middle class, blue-collar, upper-middle class, and wealthy. Wright (2015, p. 4, emphasis added) states:

The ‘middle class,’… identifies people who are more or less in the broad middle of the economy and society: they have enough education and money to participate fully in some vaguely defined ‘mainstream’ way of life. ‘Upper class’ identifies people whose wealth, high income, social connections, and valuable talents enable them to live their lives apart from ‘ordinary’ people. The ‘lower class’ identifies people who lack the necessary educational and cultural resources to live securely above the poverty line. And finally, the ‘underclass’ identifies people who live in extreme poverty, marginalized from the mainstream of American society by a lack of basic education and skills needed for stable employment.

Wright (2015) limits social class to four broad categories and focuses on individual conditions. Some sociologists split the working class from the middle class based on whether the person’s job requires a degree or license. For example, Damaske (2021) considered her research participants to be working class if their job did not require a college degree and middle class if they had a job that needed a college degree.

How Social Class Matters As a College Student

A college student can be advantaged or disadvantaged by their social class background. For instance, first-generation college students, those who do not have a parent who has completed a bachelor’s degree, are at a higher risk of not graduating. These students are more likely to be lower-income and lack the social and cultural capital that helps them succeed.

One study found that first-generation college students tend to choose applied rather than academic majors and view this choice as practical because these majors had a clear job attached to them (Wright et al., 2023). Unlike an academic major like sociology, biology, or English, an applied major like education, business, or criminal justice has an obvious career path. Education majors usually become teachers, and criminal justice majors can become prison guards. Many students (and their parents and legislatures) value degrees with obvious careers. However, most employers do not care what an applicant majored int, but instead cares more about their skills (McNair, 2023). There are, of course, some occupations like nursing where the college major does matter.

Many people are misled by the statistics on income linked with college majors. For example, some fields like computer science, statistics, and mathematics lead to jobs with wide income ranges. Some people are highly compensated in these fields, while most are paid more modestly. These high-earners skew the median higher. Moreover, higher paid degrees initially have stronger economic returns but slower wage growth overall (see Figure 6.5). In contrast, fields like education have a slimmer income range, resulting in a more modest and exact median income estimate.