Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

One in two white youth born into the upper-middle-class will fall from it. Drawing upon ten years of longitudinal interviews with over 100 American youth, this book shows which upper-middle-class youth are most likely to fall, how they fall, and why they do not see it coming. The book shows that upper-middle-class youth inherit different amounts of academic knowledge, institutional insights, and money from their parents. Those raised with more resources enter class reproduction pathways, while those raised with fewer resources enter downwardly mobile paths. Of course, upper-middle-class youth whose families give them few resources could switch courses by drawing upon the resources in their community. They rarely do. Instead, they internalize identities that reflect their resource weaknesses and encourage them to maintain them. Those who fall are then youth raised with resource weaknesses and they fall by internalizing identities that encourage them to maintain them. They are often surprised by their downward mobility as they observed other time periods in which their resources and identities kept them or their parents in their class–