User:KellyFin808/sandbox

Education provides one the most promising chances of upward social mobility into a better social class and attaining a higher social status, regardless of current social standing in the overall structure of society. However, the stratification of social classes and high wealth inequality directly affects the educational opportunities people are able to obtain and succeed in, and the chance for one’s upward social mobility. In other words, social class and a family’s socioeconomic status directly affect a child’s chances for obtaining a quality education and succeeding in life. By age five, there are significant developmental differences between low, middle, and upper class children’s cognitive and noncognitive skills. “Among older children, evidence suggests that the gap between high- and low-income primary- and secondary-school students has increased by almost 40 percent over the past thirty years. These differences persist and widen into young adulthood and beyond. Just as the gap in K–12 test scores between high- and low-income students is growing, the difference in college graduation rates between the rich and the poor is also growing. Although the college graduation rate among the poorest households increased by about 4 percentage points between those born in the early 1960s and those born in the early 1980s, over this same period, the graduation rate increased by almost 20 percentage points for the wealthiest households”.

Average family income, and social status, have both seen a decrease for the bottom third of all children between 1975-2011. The 5th percentile of children and their families have seen up to a 60% decrease in average family income. The wealth gap between the rich and the poor, the upper and lower class, continues to increase as more middle-class people get poorer and the lower-class get even poorer. As the socioeconomic inequality continues to increase in the United States, being on either end of the spectrum makes a child more likely to remain there, and never become socially mobile. “A child born to parents with income in the lowest quintile is more than ten times more likely to end up in the lowest quintile than the highest as an adult (43 percent versus 4 percent). And, a child born to parents in the highest quintile is ve times more likely to end up in the highest quintile than the lowest (40 percent versus 8 percent).”

This is due to low and working-class parents (where at least has at most a high school diploma) spending less time on average with their children in their earliest years of live and not being as involved in their children’s education and time out of school. This parenting style, known as “accomplishment of natural growth” differs from the style of middle-class and upper-class parents (with at least one parent has higher education), known as “cultural cultivation”. More affluent social classes are able to spend more time with their children at early ages, and children receive more exposure to interactions and activities that lead to cognitive and non-cognitive development: things like verbal communication, parent-child engagement, and being read to daily. These children’s parents are much more involved in their academics and their free time; placing them in extracurricular activities which develop not only additional non-cognitive skills but also academic values, habits, and abilities to better communicate and interact with authority figures. Lower class children often attend lower quality schools, receive less attention from teachers, and ask for help much less than their higher class peers. The chances for social mobility are primarily determined by the family a child is born into. Today, the gaps seen in both access to education and educational success (graduating from a higher institution) is even larger. Today, while college applicants from every socioeconomic class are equally qualified, 75% of all entering freshmen classes at top-tier american institutions belong to the uppermost socioeconomic quartile. A family’s class determines the amount of investment and involvement parents have in their children’s educational abilities and success from their earliest years of life, leaving low-income students will less chance for academic success and social mobility due to the effects that the (common) parenting style of the lower and working-class have on their outlook on and success in education. Due to the costs of college increasing 1220% between 1978 and 2014, combined with the growing income inequality and wealth gap seen in the United States, lower class students are hit much harder by rising college costs compared to upper class, wealthy students. The inability to afford a college education due to one’s socioeconomic class often traps lower income people in their social class and social status, perpetuating the chronic issue of low social mobility and high income inequality in the United States.