This report contains the testimony of Preston Cooper, a senior fellow focusing on the economics of higher education at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), to the House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies concerning the federal role in postsecondary education, and the…

In this memoir, I accounted several episodes of my childhood of a middle class family in early 1990s in a Chinese urban city. Two major discourses permeated my account: the nationalism and socialism discourse and the upward social mobility discourse. While my family and I cherish the comfort and joy of everyday life enjoyed in the era of…

In this article we describe evolving educational aspirations and practices of female high school students and their families in the context of rapidly changing education and employment markets in Kolkata. We interviewed 35 families of girls attending two government high schools. The families are from lower middle-class and lower income…

This article attempts to locate the 'English-Speaking' class in contemporary India. By unpacking different aspects of one such class in Mumbai, it sheds light on the ways in which students, teachers and those who run the class view the 'English-Speaking' course and the ability to speak 'good English'.

With the goal of motivating a broader swath of philanthropists to make well-informed, actionable "big bets" to catalyze dramatic improvements in social mobility in the United States, a Bridgespan Group team spent a year researching and developing prototypes of potential large-scale investments that aim to build pathways to the middle…

This document is part of a Bridgespan Group research project that focused on the question: "How could a philanthropist make the biggest improvement on social mobility with an investment of $1 billion?" In answering this question, the authors have sought to understand "what matters most" for improving social mobility outcomes.…

This article emphasizes the regional development in today's Russia and focuses on the current state of the system of higher education. The concept of elite professional education is used as a means of social mobility and an instrument for the formation of the social structure of a particular region. What prompted this approach was an analysis of…

As with the collapse of the subprime lending industry, the showdown between for-profit colleges and the government shows how the aspirations of the underserved, when combined with lax regulation, make the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. For-profit colleges provide high-cost degree programs that have little chance of leading to high-paying…

Children born into poverty in the United States are at higher risk for a number of nonresilient outcomes. An extensive body of work examines and then confirms the qualities of resilient children, emphasizing the importance of four social-psychological characteristics--social competence, problem solving, autonomy, and sense of purpose--and three…

This article attempts to provide some transparency with regard to how the intersection of race and class negatively affects African Americans in their effort to fight for social justice with regard to classism. Based on the explicit historical attempt to definitively make race and class synonymous, such a manufactured intersection is powerfully…

Examines Black occupational mobility and factors that have influenced the growth of the Black middle class since the 1960s. Argues that the Black middle class occupies a fragile market position because Black mobility depends on fluctuating government policy rather than on free market factors. (Author/MJL)

W. M. Liu, S. R. Ali, et al. (2004) provide a useful framework to understand the relevance of social class to counseling psychology research, but they overlook the intersection of race and social class in their review. The authors critique the middle-class mythology that pervades social class research in psychology and introduce segmented…