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Answer the question below. I'm looking for:
Length: Between 250-300 words
Completeness: Answer all aspects of the question
Evidence: Bring in specific evidence from class materials
This week we look at different kinds of social stratification systems. One such system is the socioeconomic class system of the United States. Please discuss two things: (1) the method placement in this system. How does a person get “placed” into a certain position in the class system? (2) Method of legitimation. What factors help to justify and maintain the class system?
There is no hiding the fact that our societies are based on class systems. As we have grown away from royalty and peasants, we still have a class system based on the wealthy elites and the poor working class. There are two main factors that determine placement in the class system, wealth and education. These factors are interconnected and control the lives of people in the United States. Wealth Inequality has been a huge issue in the US and has been visited a-lot in recent politics. The distribution of wealth gap in the US is enormous where the top 1% wealthiest Americans have 43% of the wealth and the top 5% own a cumulative 72% of the wealth. Those numbers are huge and your wealth correlates to how people see you and in the US we have a socioeconomic system based on this concept. However just like the days of royalty and peasants where it was hard for a peasant to obtain royalty status, it is also very difficult for someone to obtain huge amounts of wealth to join that category of wealthy elites.
The chapter from the reading: chapter 13 "Poverty at Work: Office Employment and the Crack Alternative" talks about the struggles of working class Americans in New York more specifically, the East Harlem neighborhood. Education is the main pathway to obtain a well paying job to obtain wealth and status. However for these people, they have a tough decision to make as they must choose between school to try and get an education or work to support themselves and their family. Many chose to drop out of high-school in order to pursue working class jobs. Since education is important in our class system and the low-income jobs are very unstable, many of the East Harlem residents are now out of work and are deemed to be "unemployable high school dropouts"(120). As we can see from this example, our society has a slippery slope where education leads to wealth however some wealth is needed in order to peruse education while still supporting oneself.
As this perspective described in the chapter was written in the 1990s and the wealth gap has increased since then and costs of college have sky rocketed, this slippery slope of education in order to obtain wealth has only gotten worse. Today we see a college education as essential to not be stuck in the poor working class, furthermore, those already stuck in the poor working class cannot afford the costs of obtaining an education, therefore being stuck in the poor working class for life.