The dream of social mobility is dying. Where previous generations routinely expected to surpass their parents' level of economic success, prospects for today's young people are increasingly bleak.  What role does higher education play in the process? An essential and frightening one, according to author Gary Roth. reveals the structural problems that are helping to create this problem. Gary Roth shows how universities—touted as the best way up the economic ladder for young people—actually reproduce traditional class hierarchies. And as more graduates emerge every year into economies that are no longer creating a steady stream of stable jobs, the odds of landing one decrease—and over-educated people end up scrapping for poorly compensated positions for which they're overqualified. Chapters include: Roth writes in his Introduction, “Education has become an intermediary institution between a social system that habitually sputters and declines while ever-greater amounts of consumer products are dangled in front of the system’s workforce. The result: a dynamic fraught with all sort of negative possibilities, both socially and psychotically.”    A broadside against the failures of our education system and our economy, Gary Roth’s The Educated Underclass aims to startle us out of our complacency and wake us up to action.