The problem is education has nothing to do with pay or class.........
It has to do with how high up the Corp structure you are, and how much they "value" you.
Absolutely right. There are unemployed Ivy Leaguers who came from upper class families, and there are rich people who don't have a college education. They're the exceptions, not the rules, but class level is not educational per se.
I called myself "Upper Middle" because 1) my wife and I have advanced degrees, 2) we have never had any debt for more than a few months (we even own our home outright, and we're under 30 years old), and 3) we make more money than any of our graduate school classmates (as far as we know). On the other hand, our home is rustic and does not even have a real toilet (we burn our poop), we shop at thrift stores, we share a car that's more than 10 years old, and we have no kids or pets. We were just really, really strategic, like obsessive-compulsively strategic, and willing to live a lifestyle most people would not even begin to consider. Since our circumstances are so rare among our age group, it's hard to compare ourselves to others in the tit-for-tat sense. But I consider the advantages of our lifestyle to essentially put us in competition with upper middle class or even upper class peers. A lot of middle-upper and upper class couples our age make more money than we do, but they don't collect their own water, harvest their own heat source, live a debt-free life, and I even think that some people with triple our salaries actually FEEL poorer than we are.
I don't say any of this to brag. Remember, I have a graduate degree and yet I build fires to incinerate my own ****. One of the coolest things I ever discovered in life was that I could FEEL richer than someone who was considerably richer than me in the literal sense. It's quite an empowering thing when people who earn significantly more than you ask "how do you DO that??"
I have no desire to redistribute wealth to make poor people richer. What I want to redistribute is an
empowered attitude, so that people can
feel richer than their technically richer counterparts. If I could do that, I would die happy.
You don't just have to think about privilege and education. There's also gross income, and then there's net income, and then there's discretionary income, there's net worth, and even deeper than that, there's true security, and a little farther still, I'd say there's self-actualization.