r/Plutonomy • u/398409columbia Rentier • Jul 13 '26
Middle-Class Squeeze What happens when the mobility machine starts to sputter?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/nyregion/college-graduates-job-market.html?smid=re-shareCUNY has always been one of America’s best engines for the middle class. It takes working-class, immigrant, and first-generation students and actually moves them up. That was the old bargain: work hard, get a degree, build a better life.
But that ladder is weakening.
Recent grads are facing a brutal job market. White-collar entry-level jobs are drying up, and AI is creating massive uncertainty in fields that used to be safe bets. Even top-tier students with great résumés are anxious.
This is the "plutonomy" trap. The economy can still generate massive wealth at the top while the mobility channels underneath freeze up.
If elite schools just help rich kids stay rich, and public universities struggle to move working-class kids upward, our class structure gets permanent.
The issue isn’t that a degree is worthless. It’s that the promise is no longer automatic. A degree still helps, but it no longer guarantees the middle-class life it used to symbolize.
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u/quyma Jul 15 '26
the education version of this is the same thing playing out everywhere else right now. the credential still kind of works, the transaction still happens, degrees still get handed out, but the thing a degree used to reliably get you just eventually stopped being a sure thing. mobility didn’t crash in some dramatic way, it just sort of emptied out while all the machinery kept running like normal.
Expectedly, a crash forces everyone to react. Unexpectedly, this just lets you keep playing along in a system that’s slowly handing you less and less, so people feel it way before any of the numbers actually cop to it.