The Generation That Can’t Move On Up

Wall Street Journal: The Generation That Can't Move On Up

Most people assume that working-class members of the baby-boomer generation have been hurt the most by the outsourcing and automation in which millions of factory jobs moved overseas or disappeared into computer chips, a shift recently compounded by recession. But actually it may be their children's generation.

Not only are many members of the younger working class unprepared for the contemporary job market. New research we have done shows their striking inability to fit the middle-class ideal in family and religious life. It's a worrisome development for their lifestyle and our culture.

These are the people we used to call "blue collar," although you can no longer tell a person's social class by the color of his shirt. If we can speak of a working class at all, education is now the best way to define them.

Think of people with high school degrees but not four-year college degrees. They make up slightly more than half of all Americans between the ages of 25 and 44; old enough to have completed their schooling but young enough to be still having children, and 79% of them are white. Because they don't have the educational credentials to get most middle-class professional and managerial jobs, their earnings have sunk toward the wages of the working poor.

The grim employment picture is familiar, but what's less widely known is that they are losing not only jobs but also their connections to basic social institutions such as marriage and religion. They're becoming socially disengaged, floating away from the college-educated middle class.

Consider the settings in which they have children. According to surveys by the National Center for Health Statistics, much of the recent rise in childbearing outside of marriage reflects a rise in births to cohabiting couples rather than to women living alone. The percentage of working-class women of all races who were cohabiting when they gave birth rose from 10% in the early 1990s to 27% in the mid-2000s—the largest increase of any educational group.

These working-class couples still value marriage highly. But they don't think they have what it takes to make a marriage work. Across all social classes, in fact, Americans now believe that a couple isn't ready to marry until they can count on a steady income. That's an increasingly high bar for the younger working class. As a result, cohabitation is emerging as the relationship of choice for young adults who have some earnings but not enough steady work to reach the marriage bar.

The problem is that cohabiting relationships don't go the distance. In fact, children who are born to cohabiting parents are more than twice as likely as children born to married parents to see their parents break up by age five. These break-ups are especially troubling because they are often followed by a relationship-go-round, where children are exposed to a bewildering array of parents' partners and stepparents entering and exiting their home in succession.

Church-going habits are changing, too. Traditionally, working-class couples who are married and have steady incomes have attended church, in part, to get reinforcement for the "respectable" lives they lead. But now, when a transformed economy makes marriage and steady work more difficult to attain, those who in better times might have married and attended church appear to be reluctant to show up. Thus, working-class men and women aren't going to religious services as often as they used to.

The drop-off in attendance has been greatest among whites, according to the General Social Survey, conducted biennially by the National Opinion Research Center. In the 1970s, 35% of working-class whites aged 25-45 attended religious services nearly every week, the same percentage as college-educated whites in that age group. Today, the college-educated are the only group who attend services almost as frequently as they did in the 1970s. …

I wonder if this has any connection with the post I did Friday about the recent drop in church attendance.