Executive Summary
This paper examines the rate of upward mobility on the lower, middle and upper class. The data suggest that even after controlling for differences between non-college graduates and college graduates —including such factors as age and location— it is far less likely to move up in social class and/or acquire substantial power if a person is not born of parents with said class and/or power.
On average, individuals earning 100,000 or more a year, come from homes where their parents or guardian made 100,000 or more per year.
The impact of an affluent family was even bigger in occupations where technical skills are more prevalent, such as doctors, lawyers, and chemists. Those individuals who came from an affluent household were 85 percentage more likely to graduate and gain employment making six figures. Those individuals that did not come from an affluent house hold were 75 percent more likely to be involved in criminal activity, underage pregnancy and not make over 30,000 a year.
Recent studies propose that there is less economic mobility in the United States than has long been acknowledged. The last twenty years has seen a significant drop-off in median household income growth interrelated to earlier generations.
My findings demonstrate that individuals who come from homes netting higher income per year place their offspring in better financial standing, hence better chance of upward mobility than an individual that is from a home netting a lower, middle to average income. The offspring from the lower part of the family based income scale has little to no chance of upward mobility.

Introduction
In recent years, many middle-class Americans, college students, and even politicians and policy-makers have broached the subject of the stagnant atmosphere of upward mobility among the middle-class in America. The question is, does the middle-class