Like all societies, the United States is stratified, and this stratification is often
based on a person’s socioeconomic status (SES). This complex formula takes into
account three factors:
- Education
- Occupation
- Income
The number of years a person spends in school, plus the prestige of his or her
occupation, plus the amount of money he or she makes, determine one’s social class. While this
method of dividing up the population into classes might be useful, it has several shortcomings.
Education
One determinant of socioeconomic status is education. People with a high school degree
are classified in one group. People with college degrees are put into another. Using
educational attainment levels to indicate SES is problematic for two reasons:
- School systems in this country are not uniform in quality.
- Not everyone has equal access to primary, secondary, and higher education.
Free, compulsory education has existed in the United States since the beginning of the
twentieth century, but some school systems are better than others. The American public
education system tends to be highly decentralized, with decisions about what to include in the
school curriculum being made at the state or local level. School systems differ widely in what
they choose to teach and when.
Disparity of Resources Among Public Schools
Some school systems produce graduates who are prepared for higher education, while
others turn out people whose basic math and language skills are so poor that they qualify for
only a few types of jobs. The quality of the education a school provides depends largely on
its budget, which in turn relies heavily on the tax base of the town or city in which it is
located. Wealthy cities can afford better teachers, newer materials, and superior technology,
whereas poor cities can barely afford basic supplies.
Poorer communities also tend to have a higher dropout rate than wealthier
communities. Therefore, while establishing a profile of a typical high school graduate is
difficult, the assumption remains, for the purposes of social classification, that all high
school graduates are equally prepared for either the workplace or for higher
education.
