‘I Was a Shadow in the Dark’
Student Rehan Siddique is first in a new East Bay Today series on social mobility to share how college is transforming his future
The American dream. It means many things to many people — the ability to buy a home, go to college, enter a career of choice — but its most basic principle is that those aspirations can be achieved by anyone in this country who is willing to work for them. Yet a spate of recent studies finds that one of the fundamental ideals of American democracy, social mobility, has been on the decline for decades.
As just one example, according to the Equal Opportunity Project (a policy organization rooted in big data), a child’s likelihood of out-earning their parents has fallen 40 percent in the last century. Even more troubling, per the Brookings Institute, how you start off in life is a predominant indicator of how you’ll finish: “If you are born to parents in the poorest fifth of the income distribution, your chance of remaining stuck in that income group is around 35 to 40 percent. If you manage to be born into a higher-income family, the chances are similarly good that you will remain there in adulthood,” the 2016 analysis read.