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I don't know how the QuestBridge awards actually break down in terms of who they give their money to, but here's what their website says:


It's interesting how they define low-income. 60K for a family of 4 isn't really low-income in the US. Among applicants to elite colleges, I'm sure it's down there--but I think median income for a family of 4 is about 50-55K.

I don't know what the "long-term economic hardship" part means, but I assume they're saying that you're not going to get this if you got laid off this year but live in a 700K house and have two new SUVs in the garage.

50-50k in a place like NY city would be very low income.

Off topic: interesting article as to what is the middle class.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/04/14/middle-class-hard-define/2080565/

"A 2008 Pew poll found that 40% of Americans with incomes below $20,000 – roughly equivalent to the poverty line – described themselves as middle class. -third with incomes above $150,000 said they're middle class, too."

Yes--the cost of living in your area matters. Still, it doesn't take away from the reality that 60K isn't really "low income," speaking statistically. However, maybe 60K is their very upper limit and most of their kids are in 20K families.

Re that article--yup, everybody thinks they're middle class. It's the American way. It's also why I'm a stickler for pointing out that no, 150K is NOT "middle income" or "average."

What Z-score range (how many standard deviations) does your definition of "average" comprise? Is it -1 to 1, -2 to 2, or -0.1 to -0.1? If a gifted program has a an IQ cutoff of 130, and special ed has an IQ cutoff of 70, then students with IQs from 70 to 130, a Z-score range of -2 to 2, are effectively being considered "average" or "normal".

Yes, an income of 150K is above average, but if you group households into the categories of poor, middle class, and rich,
where you set the thresholds is a matter of judgement. How the $150K is earned should also be considered. I consider a
couple each earning $75K more "middle class" than one where the husband earns $150K and the wife can afford to be a SAHM.

Your argument seems a bit silly to me. Yes, if we want to make an extremely broad range like that, then we could consider incomes from 30K to 200K "average."

I'm talking about people who conflate median and average and truly think 100K+ is median income for a typical family. 150K is nowhere near the national median income for a family of 4.

In a certain environment, you can get into this mindset of "Well, we make 125K and we can barely make the payments on the house and the cars and the this and the that, so we're obviously middle-class. We're just getting by." There is little awareness of other realities.

I suspect that people who earn 150K and call themselves middle class do so because they compare themselves with very wealthy people. I also suspect that many or most think of themselves as UPPER middle class.

Yes, $150K affords a nice standard of living, but it's likely that nearly everyone in this income category depends on a paycheck, unlike the very wealthy. Also, people in the former group with two kids still have to budget their money, can only dream of flying in a private jet and can't even afford to fly the family in business or first class and have basically no extra sway over the political process. So they aren't truly "rich."

But they can afford to buy a house, can put the whole family on a jet in economy class and maybe afford private school tuition on a monthly payment plan. So this makes them upper middle class.

There is a political subtext to the definition of "middle class". Some politicians run on class warfare and say the rich are not paying their fair share (without defining what a fair share would be -- it's always more). So designating someone as "rich" means that you can gouge them. The president seems to use $250K for a married couple as the benchmark for "rich". Another phrase the class warriors love is "working class", although upper-income households tend to have more adults actually working full-time than lower-income households do.

My wife and I work full time and expect our children to do so when they grow up. Although our income is a multiple of the family median, we want our children to have a middle class mentality. They think going to Denny's is a real treat. So far, so good.

You mean Denny's (or the local equivalent) isn't a real treat in some people's minds?

I also find it amusing that some white-collar professions have lower salaries than some "blue-collar" ones at this point in time. Compare an elementary classroom teacher with, say, a plumber or electrician. The teacher, in many states, makes far less than the median, and the tradesperson often makes double or even triple the teacher's salary.

Funny world, the "middle" class and "working" class.

I am definitely a member of the working class, more's the pity.

Hmm. Mine think of it as the least worst option when on the road (ice cream with bacon in it?!? )

Seriously, I agree that $250K isn't "rich" by the standards of heavily taxing people. This is because taking, say, $25,000 from people at that income level will affect their standard of living. Alternatively, taking $4 million from someone who has $40 million will not affect his ability to not work and fly private between his 5 nice houses on 5 continents. And a large chunk of the wealth in this country is concentrated not in the 1%, but in the way-past-1% crowd.

I totally get that $250K annually makes for a very good living and is a very long way from the mean. And I know that there are people earning that much who might not understand how hard it is for the poor. But I think that the real problem in this respect is the hyper-wealthy and what they pay their employees here and overseas.

But there's also another side to the argument about not getting it though: people who think that someone who earns $250K per year is rich don't get what rich truly is. Truly wealthy people live in a world that is very, very different from even the low-end one-percenters earning $500K per year. This is not simply about standard of living. It's about influencing policy, creating problems that damage the economy on a large scale, and getting away with stuff that other people wouldn't even get away with in their dreams.

I'm not shouting that all wealthy people are evil! I'm just pointing out that some of them are very self-interested and you don't need many to be that way to create some serious large-scale problems.

Eh. I don't know. I think 250K is very rich, globally speaking. I agree with you that there is, of course, an entire other class of wealth (several other entire classes, really) with a very different kind of power. However, numerically speaking, there are a lot more of the 250Kers.

I agree that 100K is probably actually upper-middle class in the US. No one seems very eager to claim that moniker.