There’s a lot more to say about this piece, and maybe I will try to figure out some way to say it. But this article is fire: Born Poor Stay Poor. The whole thing is excellent:

The American dream has been sold and replaced with a Ponzi scheme meant to benefit the investor class. College degrees, once a pinnacle of long-term investment and self-betterment, increasingly look like the multi-level-marketing vitamin supplements hoarded in the back of your mother’s fridge. Predatory interest rates insure a lifetime of payment, which in turn prevents class mobility and enforces the limitations of their birth.

Lubrano’s book Limbo tackles these ideas as well, and I think if it were written today it would focus a lot more on systems than culture.