income brackets. With the method of such a rise being, itself, locked behind what some may call a “paywall”, mobility becomes an impossible task for many. That is not to say that reforms have not, or are not being, undertaken. Recently, United States President Joe Biden proposed the American Families Plan, which would spend nearly 300 billion dollars towards making community college free for all Americans (Tankersley and Goldstein, 2021), and promote free access to college. The plan would restore the top marginal income tax rate to (a pre-2017 level of) 39.6%, and double capital gains tax for individuals earning more than one million dollars (Tankersley, 2021), and thus be funded through taxes gathered from those who do not constitute low- or- middle-income; while it may face severe opposition in Congress, it may be a step to reducing educational inequality and lack of access. This will increase graduation rates, removing potential opportunity costs for attending a 2-or 4-year program at any college. Furthermore, many states have started to offer tuition free community college educations on their own, through programs such as the California Promise or the Work Ready Kentucky Scholarship Program (Farrington, 2020), which may have contributed to the recent increase in college enrollment rates. With these changes and reforms, however, the problem itself has not been changed. According to Beth Akers, some of the factors still influencing access to colleges through higher tuition includes administrative bloat, overbuilding of campus amenities, a model dependent on high-wage labor, and the availability of standardized student loans (which may be beneficial for some, but is indeed contributing to the rise in college tuition); these cost inefficiencies persist (2020), and recent education reforms have not been successful in making the average college more affordable (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). It may be more effective for the federal government to seek the root causes towards the unaffordability of education on a national level instead of focusing on making college free or affordable through taxpayer money. These programs would help relieve or alleviate the social issues present, but these reforms may only be a temporary solution. Despite this paper’s conclusion, there are certain limitations that must be considered. First, this is in no way a complete overview of the paper’s topic. Social mobility is not limited to income, or one’s educational level; there are multiple factors that may be correlated that this paper does not address. It may thus be easier to see this research as an exploration into one aspect of social mobility, rather than a complete explanation of it. Second, the data or sources cited in the paper may have to be accounted for in terms of sample size or range. For example, college enrollment rates increased for lower-income families in the last twenty years: while I have concluded that this may be the result of a combination of state-level reform and shifting perspectives, the data’s inclusion of ‘low income’ may not be as broad, or as clear. The data taken to corroborate the overall argument is only be a small fraction of all data available, and the ones I have chosen may deviate in smaller ways from an overall conclusion: on a similar trend, but with smaller issues. Third, the assumptions made in this paper relating to the organization of American society and overall status as dictated by income may be inaccurate, at least in terms of education. This paper speaks of social status as dependent on one’s income, yet, as mentioned, there are many other factors that influences one’s social status, such as occupation, race, or sex. As I have not touched on such aspects, the argument that I have made
381
