Over the last month, we’ve spent a lot of time digging into the Success Sequence. The Success Sequence is a series of culturally approved activities that are said to increase your odds of staying in or climbing into the middle class.
Those steps are:
Get a high school degree.
Get a full-time job.
Get married before having children.
This idea was fleshed out by The Brookings Institution in 2009 in Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill’s book, “Creating an Opportunity Society,” and comes back around in both right-wing circles and moderate, left/center publications like the Atlantic.
Each week we’ve gone into detail on each stop on the train to American success and tried to evaluate the merit of the advice.
These points aren’t bad advice. Having a full-time job and getting married before having children even correlate with being “middle class.” (Graduating high school, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be the key anymore.) College graduation is a better metric nowadays, which the Brookings Institution has acknowledged.
However, after learning more about the Success Sequence, I’m left with more questions.
Questions like:
Are we okay with the fact that caring for young children or disabled or elderly family members makes it really hard to be middle class? So hard that the success sequence doesn’t apply to you?
Do we want to live in a society in which full-time workers can still be well below the poverty line? People working 40 hours a week, and still unable to eat or pay rent?
Are we cool with needing an expensive degree to live the American Dream?
In summary- do we want to live in a world where completing three culturally approved tasks might give us a small leg up on our peers, a small advantage in the fight for a smaller and smaller piece of the American Pie?
It’s great that a map exists for success, and if you’re not caring for family members, a young or unmarried parent, a high school drop out, or disabled, these three steps seem to be able to at least give you a fighting chance to entering the middle class.
What about everyone else? Why would we romanticize building a society that conveniently leaves out the most vulnerable members?
I think we deserve better. I think the vulnerable in our society deserve better. I’m going to be real- I don’t have the answers (I think that’s obvious, but I didn’t want it to go unsaid.) I do think that the answers can come from everyday people like you and me. I think that if we put our heads together and agree that we’re worth it and we deserve it, we could think of something that works for everyone.