In terms of the labor market, some college is better than no college at all. But because the biggest boost to economic success and social mobility comes from having a college degree, kids from upper-class backgrounds are once again widening their lead in the race that matters most. Kids from low-income backgrounds—like David, Kayla, Michelle, Lauren, Lola, and Sofia, to say nothing of Elijah—are working more or less diligently to improve their prospects in life, but no matter how talented and hardworking they are, at best they are improving their play at checkers, while upper-class kids are widening their lead at three-dimensional chess.

Summarizing the progress of rich kids and poor kids up the educational ladder in recent years, Figure 4.6 follows a single cohort of kids for a decade, from 2002 (when they were in the tenth grade) to 2012 (when most of them had climbed as far as they were likely to get).80 The left-most pair of columns shows that most of the sophomore class of 2002 successfully received a high school diploma. That includes 92 percent of kids from the top quartile of the socioeconomic hierarchy, and 64 percent of kids from the bottom quartile.⁸¹

Figure 4.6 also shows that most of those who graduated from high school actually applied to college, though rich kids were much more likely to reach that rung (90 percent) than poor kids (59 percent). An even more serious winnowing took place as the kids actually crossed the threshold into college. Of all rich kids, 89 percent had enrolled in college within two years of high school graduation, compared to only 46 percent of all poor kids. And by the time this cohort actually reached the rung of college graduation, 58 percent of all rich kids had made it to the top, compared to only 12 percent of all poor kids. It was as if the poor kids had weights attached to their feet that grew heavier and heavier with each step up the ladder.

On the other hand, as we have seen throughout this chapter, it is important to distinguish between the sites of disparity and the causes of disparity. It would be too easy to assume that because family income so closely predicts college graduation, college costs must be the cause of class discrepancies. The fact that a given rung of the ladder (such as college graduation) is the site of a rapidly growing class gap does not imply that that rung itself caused the gap. In fact, all of the factors that we’ve discussed so far in this book—family structure, parenting, childhood development, peer groups, extracurricular opportunities—have contributed to the widening gap in college graduation rates in recent decades, along with the neighborhood and community influences that we shall discuss in the next chapter.82 The burdens on the poor kids have been gathering weight since they were very young. Rising tuition costs and student debt are the final straw, not the main load.