Economic Mobility Project In The News

• Education Week: The Cost of College Many low-income students don’t go to college because they lack information about how to apply for the financial aid that would make it possible, according to a study by Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project. READ MORE »
• The Indianapolis Star - Colleges Answering a More Urgent Call for Financial Aid In some cases, they are turning to private, financial aid gurus who make a living helping families navigate the often-confusing financial aid landscape -- a terrain so complicated and filled with paperwork that many students simply give up, especially low-income students, according to a recent study by the Pew Center's Economic Mobility Project.READ MORE »
• The Lakeland Ledger - Paying For College: Simplify Financial Aid "Although in many respects the American Dream is alive and well," said John E. Morton, managing director of economic policy at The Pew Charitable Trusts, "the body of evidence tells us two important things: First, that the lowest rungs of the economic ladder in America are hardest to climb up from and, second, that a college education is the most effective asset people can possess to move ahead."READ MORE »
• Marketplace: Americans need more help to move up Over generations, a strong American economy has lifted the boats of virtually everyone. But the American Dream has always been about more than a rising tide. It's grounded in the idea of a meritocracy where people have the ability to chart their own course -- ahead of the fleet.READ MORE »
• Inside Higher Ed - Low Income Students Unaware of Aid Options, Report Says Many low-income students who could benefit from higher education don't apply to college because they don't know they could get financial assistance or they are intimidated by the process, says a new report, "Promoting Economic Mobility by Increasing Postsecondary Education," released Tuesday by the Pew Charitable Trusts. READ MORE »
• The Gainsville Sun - Editorial: Financial Aid Maze The Pew Charitable Trust announced a study this week which makes the case that the very complexity of the process of applying for financial aid deters many would-be students from entering college.READ MORE »
• The Daily Beast - Hooray for Obama's 'Socialist' Budget A recent Brookings/Pew report showed that in the U.S., 69 percent of the population agrees that "people get rewarded for intelligence and skill." That's the highest of the 25 countries they surveyed.READ MORE »
• Editorial: Economic optimism still alive in America While partisans continue to disagree on whether Obama's initiatives will lead to recovery, few Americans believe that all is lost. At least that's the good news reported by the Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.READ MORE »
• CNN - African-American Optimism What does the future hold for your children? Will they be better off than you are? Here's how some people answered that question. READ MORE »
• The Detroit News - American Dream Still Surpasses Class Warfare Inequality and the hardy American dream The masses are calling for AIG execs' heads. The majority of Americans support a bill to make it easier for unions to organize. Bashing greedy Wall Street tycoons has become fashionably fun. READ MORE »
• The Modesto Bee - Does Nation's Optimism Live Here? When that happens -- when the glass surely appears to be half empty -- it's hard to have a hopeful or cheerful view. But a national survey by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows Americans to be precisely that -- optimistic -- when it comes to the future. READ MORE »
• Worcester Telegram & Gazette - A Matter of Confidence: Deep Down, America Truly is Sound Wall Street averages staged a four-day rally that was positively bullish by recent standards, although things had cooled off by Friday afternoon. And, a poll conducted for Pew’s Economic Mobility Project showed that more than 70 percent of Americans believe they can, and eventually will, improve their family’s economic circumstances in coming years. READ MORE »
• Minnesota Public Radio - Is Populism In The Air? Don't Bet On It "Americans have traditionally been against engaging in class warfare," says Morton, managing director of Economic Policy at The Pew Charitable Trusts. "They have been against supporting policies that are seen as attacking those who are successful and wealthy because there is this view that it might be us one day."READ MORE »
• The Star Ledger - N.J.'s Faces of the Recession: Economic Downturn Hits Home In a recent poll commissioned by Pew Charitable Trusts, seven out of 10 people described their economic situation as only fair or poor and nearly half thought the government hurts more than it helps. However, more than 70 percent also thought things will get better.READ MORE »
• The Atlantic Online - America, The (Jacksonian) Meritocracy A fascinating survey released Thursday by the Pew Economic Mobility Project-one of the few million research arms of the Pew Charitable Trusts-illuminates from some fresh angles the complex American attitudes toward opportunity, fairness and government likely to shape public reaction to President Obama's sweeping agenda.READ MORE »
• Reuters - Americans retain optimism in recession Americans remain broadly optimistic about their economic prospects in the middle of the most severe recession since World War Two, according to a survey released on Thursday.READ MORE »
• CNN - Anderson Cooper 360 President Obama is now playing the role of optimist in chief. And a new survey out tonight shows that many Americans are feeling confident about the future. We have got the results of that survey for you. (Segment 9:28-14:12)READ MORE »
• CNBC - Americans Remain Optimistic About Economy: Survey Americans remain broadly optimistic about their economic prospects in the middle of the most severe recession since World War Two, according to a survey released Thursday. The Pew Economic Mobility Project found that despite dismal economic conditions and decades of widening income inequality, Americans still widely believe in the "American Dream": the idea that success is determined by one's willingness to work hard, not the circumstances of one's birth or other external forces. READ MORE »
• US News & World Report - Hot Docs: Healthcare Costs Put U.S. Workers and Companies at Global Disadvantage Despite the current economic crisis and recession, Americans remain optimistic about the future. According to a poll conducted for the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project, nearly 80 percent of Americans believe it is possible to improve their economic standing and are optimistic that the economic situation for their family will improve in years to come.READ MORE »
• Dow Jones NewsPlus - Econ Standing Bigger Concern Than Inequality - US Survey A national survey released Thursday examining wealth inequality shows that Americans, by a 71% to 21% margin, are more interested in the government trying to improve their economic standing than they are in seeing income inequality addressed. READ MORE »
• VOA News - Survey: Americans are Optimistic Despite Recession A new study shows that Americans are optimistic that their economic prospects will improve within their lifetime and from one generation to the next. This, despite data that shows the United States has less economic mobility than many other industrialized countries. READ MORE »
• Sydney Morning Herald - Economic nightmare fails to shake belief in the American dream THROUGHOUT the US election campaign, candidate Barack Obama exhorted his crowds to vote for him and claim back the American dream - a dream, he warned, that was slipping way from families.READ MORE »
• Economist.com - American Exceptionalism AMERICAN exceptionalism is surviving the economic downturn, at least according to a new piece of research for the Pew Economic Mobility Project. READ MORE »
• Huffington Post - Surveys: Americans Grip To Individualism In Economic Storm In the face of a recession that has destroyed billions in family savings and home values, Americans remain convinced that personal initiative and hard work are the key to big rewards, and they continue to repudiate the idea of government intervention to alleviate economic inequality, according to two Pew-sponsored reports.READ MORE »
• Yahoo!News - MLK's Dream Also Included Economic Justice The focus of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 wasn't what had been accomplished — but rather his view of what still needed to be done.READ MORE »
• Democracy Journal - Equality Barack Obama’s election to the presidency highlights a profound paradox at the heart of American race relations. After centuries of exclusion, black Americans have been almost wholly accepted into the public sphere of American life, and they are central to the nation’s definition of itself as a political and social community.READ MORE »
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Middle class in Georgia fits into Obama's plans When President-elect Barack Obama put the fate of the middle class at the center of his presidential campaign, he wasn’t just taking a shot in the dark. A number of reports have shown that income inequality has grown across the nation over the past two decades.READ MORE »
• The Nation - Beyond Rubinomics Every time I read about a solution to the economic crisis these days, I invariably find an underlying assumption that once we are past all this, America will be just fine again. If we get the banks spending, if we stop the mortgage defaults, if we stimulate enough and if we reregulate the errant, greedy financial community, prosperity is sure to follow. READ MORE »
• Minnesota Public Radio - Is Moving into the Middle Class a Dream Deferred? Recent studies suggest that even in good times, Americans in the middle and lower classes largely stayed there, going back decades. What concerns economists even more is that people in the middle class tend to have a tough time recovering after recessions.READ MORE »
• The Christian Science Monitor - Can more spending revive the American Dream? What the American economy needs is spenders. It needs big spenders, such as states and municipalities, to build bridges, pave roads, and keep garbage trucks running and police on the beat. It needs tens of millions of smaller spenders to buy blankets and cars and television sets to help businesses prosper so they can keep their employees. READ MORE »
• Washington Post Economy Watch - Neil Irwin's Must-Reads Our latest report, U.S. Intragenerational Economic Mobility From 1984 to 2004: Trends and Implications, is named as one of Neil Irwin's "Must-Reads."READ MORE »
• WSJ Real Time Economics - Report Shows Stagnant Upward Mobility in U.S. A new report by Pew’s Economic Mobility Project broke individuals up into five income brackets or quintiles and found that of those in the lowest bracket, half were still likely to be there 10 years later. It’s a trend that held true for a group studied from 1984 to 1994 and reiterated itself in a group studied from 1994 to 2004.READ MORE »
• CNN Money - The Economy: Why it feels so bad Simply having a job is a start, but if your wages don't keep pace with inflation, you "feel" that, too. This generation is not making as much money as its fathers were, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project. READ MORE »
• USAToday - What a black president will mean for race relations By everyone's measure, the election of an African-American president just four decades after race riots marked the tumultuous end of segregation is extraordinary. As Barack Obama noted in his victory speech Tuesday night, it is a measure of the nation's ability to reinvent itself as it strives to attain the elusive American ideal.READ MORE »
• The New York Times - A Fool's Paradise With less than a month left until Election Day, there is still time for the presidential candidates to focus with great intensity on what should be the most important issue of this campaign. It’s not just the economy, stupid — it’s jobs.READ MORE »
• The Herald - S.C. Leaders Unite on Bailout Rep. Gresham Barrett jumped on board the bailout express Friday as all six House members from South Carolina helped Congress pass a $700 billion financial rescue bill.READ MORE »
• The Washington Times - Vouchers Benefit Foster Children One of the first groups to broach the idea of using vouchers to ease education disruptions for foster children was the Maryland Public Policy Institute. That outfit articulated the idea in a 2005 paper authored by a Heritage Foundation colleague, Dan Lips. READ MORE »
• The Guardian - The Fading American Dream News moves so fast these days that the Democratic national convention already seems something like a dream, though it only concluded last Thursday - with a Barack Obama discourse grounded firmly in reality. READ MORE »
• The Boston Globe - Down the Up Escalator "Few barometers should motivate the next president more than the ongoing Pew Economic Mobility Project." READ MORE »
• Detroit Free Press - Soaring home values help keep personal debt rising Worried yet about all the debt you're carrying? If not, perhaps you should be.READ MORE »
• The New York Times - Is Obama the End of Black Politics? Forty-seven years after he last looked out from behind the bars of a South Carolina jail cell, locked away for leading a march against segregation in Columbia, James Clyburn occupies a coveted suite of offices on the second and third floors of the United States Capitol, alongside the speaker and the House majority leader... READ MORE »
• The Plain Dealer - Black in Northeast Ohio: How African-Americans are faring The number of affluent black families has surged in Northeast Ohio over the last 35 years. But as a black upper class blossomed in the Cleveland suburbs, the black middle class eroded, in sharp contrast to the national trend.READ MORE »
• USA Today - Debt-Squeezed Gen X Saves Little At age 30, Bryan Short has, by any standard, achieved professional success since graduating from Boston College and law school at the College of William and Mary. Yet despite his job as a Washington mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, he's nowhere near as financially secure as he expected to be by now.READ MORE »
• New York Times - Higher Education Gap May Slow Economic Mobility Economic mobility, the chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades, a study being released on Wednesday says. The authors of the study, by scholars at the Brookings Institution in Washington and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, warned that widening gaps in higher education between rich and poor, whites and minorities, could soon lead to a downturn in opportunities for the poorest families. READ MORE »
• Chicago Tribune - Housing mess threatens to widen income gap For most Americans, owning a home has been their winning bet on the American dream. It has been their major source for borrowing, for building savings, and for retirement. And at least 40 percent of the nation's poor own their own homes. But shrinking home values, and tightening credit, which makes it more difficult for people to buy or hold on to homes, threaten to hasten the growing income equality in the U.S., warns a study of Americans' economic mobility slated for release Wednesday.READ MORE »
• Tattered Dream, Who'll Tackle the Issue Of Upward Mobility? We're not who we think we are. The American self-image is suffused with the golden glow of opportunity. We think of the United States as a land of unlimited possibility, not so much a classless society but as a place where class is mutable -- a place where brains, energy and ambition are what counts, not the circumstances of one's birth. But three new studies suggest that Horatio Alger doesn't live here anymore. READ MORE »
• The Economist - The Greasy Ladder Some black Americans are doing very well. Barack Obama is pulling ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Tiger Woods is the world's best-paid athlete. Stan O'Neal was given a $160m golden parachute as he was ejected from Merrill Lynch last month. But these exceptional folk are indeed exceptional. For members of the black middle class, the news is gloomier. New research suggests that their grip on affluence is precarious. READ MORE »
• C-SPAN - Washington Journal Managing Director John E. Morton answered viewer questions for an hour on Thanksgiving Day. To view, please click on the 11/22/07 link on CSPAN.org site (link below); the section on economic mobility begins 1:34 into the clip.READ MORE »
• Washington Post - The GOP's Pocketbook Issue Republicans have spent years wondering when Americans will finally wake up and realize they are actually happy about the state of the economy. A slowdown may now be in the offing, but that does not explain why the credit has never rolled in for six years of uninterrupted economic growth or the creation of more than 8 million jobs since August 2003. Has an exhausting war overwhelmed the upbeat economic news? Has the public just been in a sour mood this decade? READ MORE »
• Marketplace Morning Report - Rags to Riches Still a Fairy Tale A report out says most people are making more money than their parents did. But it also says despite making more money, a lot of them still go from being poor children to poor adults. Nancy Marshall Genzer has more.READ MORE »
• Christian Science Monitor - American dream falters Lionel Santibañez is better off because his parents came to America. His father was illiterate and his mother spoke little English when they arrived in Texas from Mexico in 1980. But they sacrificed, saved, and pushed their kids into good schools – and today Mr. Santibañez is a college graduate who works at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston as a scientific editor.READ MORE »
• Washington Post - Middle-Class Dream Eludes African American Families Nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults, according to a new study -- a perplexing finding that analysts say highlights the fragile nature of middle-class life for many African Americans. READ MORE »
• Wall Street Journal - Blacks Trail in Growth of Income Blacks born into the middle class in the late 1960s are far more likely than whites to earn less than their parents, a new study of economic mobility has found. The study examined how children born in the late 1960s fared in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Overall, it found that two-thirds of the adult children earned more, adjusted for inflation, than their parents did at the same age in the late 1960s.READ MORE »
• The Border Line Blog - Immigrants and Money The economic progress of immigrants in the United States is slowing, in a trend that does not bode well for future generations, a new study says. The trend is partly due to a larger influx of immigrants with lower levels of education who earn lower wages, said the study released Wednesday by the Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of the non-partisan Pew Charitable Trusts READ MORE »
• Wall Street Journal Blog - Immigrants and Their Kids Are Losing Ground Economically Immigrants and their children are losing ground economically to native-born workers, contributing to increasing income inequality in the U.S., a study backed by liberal and conservative think tanks found.READ MORE »
• ABCnews.com - Wages Through the Ages: Men Earn Less Than Fathers at Same Age A new report finds that men in their 30s make less money than their fathers did at the same age, raising questions about deeply held notions of social mobility and the realities of the American Dream. It's not just because they're typical Generation X slackers either. READ MORE »
• MSNBC.com - Every generation does better? Don't count on it The American dream has always held that each generation will enjoy a higher standard of living than the previous one, and that is still true, as measured by household income. But the generational gains are slowing, and the increased participation of women in the work force is the only thing keeping the dream alive, according to an analysis of Census data released Friday.READ MORE »
• Marketplace Morning Report - Not your father's American Dream A new study reveals that while American men are working harder than the generation before them, they are earning less. Families are keeping pace because two-income households are now the norm. Audio interview of John E. Morton by Jeremy Hobson. READ MORE »
• NPR Day to Day - Study: Men in Their 30s Make Less Than Their Dads Young men in their 30s in the United States are not doing as well financially as their fathers' generation did. A study released today on economic mobility shows that, on average, 30-something males make about 12 percent less than they would have 30 years ago. The report appears to challenge the conventional wisdom that each generation will do better than the one before. An audio interview with John E. Morton.READ MORE »
• Wall Street Journal - Not Your Father's Pay: Why Wages Today Are Weaker American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers' generation, a reversal from just a decade ago, when sons generally were better off than their fathers, a new study finds. The study, the first in a series on economic mobility undertaken by several prominent think tanks, also says the typical American family's income has lagged far behind productivity growth since 2000, a departure from most of the post-World War II period.READ MORE »
• Financial Times - Has the American Dream become almost impossible? Sir, I applaud your editorial "Learning to swim in the modern economy. Not everyone is getting richer. That poses risks for us all" (March 24) for not only addressing income inequality but also calling for political debate to focus more on economic mobility and opportunity. READ MORE »
• Wall Street Journal - Pew Trust to Fund Bipartisan Study of US Mobility The Pew Charitable Trusts is expected to announce today that it is giving $2.2 million over two years to four local think tanks -- two liberal, two conservative -- in an unusual effort to forge a consensus across the political spectrum about the extent to which Americans can move up the economic ladder in their lifetimes and from one generation to the next.READ MORE »
• Editorial: Poor Kids Can Move to Higher Income Brackets - with a College Degree A new report by the Brookings Institution is a clarion call for massive, effective reform of public education so it can do a better job of closing the income gap. "Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Mobility in America" points out that the ticket out of poverty isn't singing, rapping or tossing a football. It's a college degree. READ MORE »