On top of this, there is another issue. Years ago you used to hear a lot about people being the first in their family to go to or graduate from college. That has become a lot more rare. What we now see instead is that the bulk of kids fit into one of two boxes:
- Two married parents, both college educated.
- Single mother with a HS Diploma (at best) and absent (or outright unknown) father.
Worse, this sorting has been going on long enough that it is now multi-generational such that most of the kids in group #1, in addition to having two college educated parents, also have four college educated grandparents and frequently college educated aunts and uncles as well. Meanwhile the kids in group #2 tend to have less grandparent involvement (because the missing dad's parents are also missing) and rarely have college educated grandparents, aunts, or uncles.
This creates a vast gulf between group #1 and group #2. For one thing, intelligence is at least partially heritable so the kids in group #1, on average, are smarter than the kids in group #2 to begin with. They also have smarter and more involved parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. The kids in group #1 have advantages that the kids in group #2 simply do not have.
The collapse of the urban high schools was like a snowball rolling downhill. As they declined the parents who could afford to get out left and those parents tended to have the best students in the schools so their exit hurt the schools more which caused more parents to leave and this feedback loop ultimately resulted in the catastrophically bad urban High Schools that we have in the US today.
Yep. I'm basically a product of both of the things you describe here. My grandpa on my dad's side was a machinist on the South side of Chicago. On my mom's side, my grandpa was basically the equivalent of an industrial engineer, but I'm not sure if that was a "grow into it" job or if he actually went to college. My dad went to college and was the first in his family; his brothers went to Vietnam. My mom went to college.
They initially lived in Chicago, then moved out to the suburb of Oak Park. Eventually (just after I was born) they moved further out to the very white, very WASP-y, very well off suburb of Wheaton.
They struggled. We lived in a rented, not owned, home basically my entire childhood. They did alright, but we were most assuredly NOT the well-to-do family in the area. Basically solid middle class, in an upper-middle class neighborhood.
I think I know why they did it. There's nature and nurture. They wanted their kids to be in an environment where nobody was ever asked "are you going to college?" It would have been a ludicrous question. The question was "where are you going to college?" They know that we're all partially products of our environment, so they wanted to set us up in the best environment they could.
I'm sure my life would have been a lot different if I'd grown up in the neighborhood around 61st and Pulaski where my dad did. Which isn't to say I wouldn't have gone to college or been successful, but that SO many differences in my upbringing would have made me a different person than who I am today.
Of course, what that means is that if we're partially products of our environment, and we self-segregate those environments based on class, then you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy where the bad environments are nearly impossible to get out of and be successful, and the good environments produces "failures" who probably still end up doing well enough. And they perpetuate themselves generation by generation.
