The next unlock of the American Dream
What comes after home ownership, entrepreneurship, and the college degree?
The core institutions by which we achieved greater and broader economic opportunity and social mobility in the 20th century can’t be inherited for the 21st century.
The GFC taught us that home ownership is no longer the guaranteed wealth accumulator that we hoped it would be.
Small businesses have a steep uphill climb against industry consolidation and globalization.
Pensions and unions are few and far between, with the former being severely underfunded.
The premium that a bachelor’s degree holds across industries and geographies is slipping away.
There’s a lack of consensus on whether or not we can successfully revive these legacy pathways to the American Dream, and even if we could, the tradeoffs of doing so challenge whether or not we should keep them alive at all.
What Open Work aims to do at the product level - replace the traditional resume, cover letter, reference check, and eventually, the credit score - it also aims to do at the societal level: be a new unlock to the American Dream just as home ownership, small business entrepreneurship, pensions and unions, and the 4-year degree once were for previous generations.
I can accept that there are winners and losers subject to the fluctuations of the real estate market, structural disadvantages of small businesses compared to global conglomerates, and the challenges facing pensions and unions trying to keep their promises.
However, as someone who has benefitted from and worked for college access organizations for 15 years, I struggle with a 4-year degree being the difference between the haves and the have nots.
In the book Outclassed, Joan C. Williams describes the current political moment of steep partisanship, charged identity politics, and growing populism to the gap in life outcomes as well as culture between college and non-college grads.
She calls it the “diploma divide”.
I owe the trajectory of my life largely to a college prep program that recruited me in 9th grade, and ever since, I’ve supported thousands of students like me through college access programs across the country.
For me, college was both the easy decision and the best decision. For so many of my peers who were just as smart and worthy, it was certainly not the former, and often not the latter either.
For the privileged few among us with a degree, we quickly realize how little of what we did and learned during that time actually matters in the real world.
Of all the things that we could use to systematize meritocracy, college is one of the worst milestones to choose.
Today, we knowingly and unfairly punish (and reward) opportunities based on what decisions people made based on a set of options that were largely shaped by factors outside of their control during a small window of time while they were teenagers.
No wonder so many people feel like the game is rigged.
They don’t want charity or a hand out. They want their lives to come as close as possible to being a reflection of the decisions they made under fair circumstances, for better or for worse.
That could be much better achieved by letting people build a lifelong reputation through how they show up everyday at work, regardless of how prestigious or not that job may be, as opposed to what grade they got in algebra when they were 15.
The world doesn’t have room for all of us to be wealthy homeowners, business owners, pension beneficiaries, or college grads. However, it does have everything it needs - from the technology and capital to the cultural resonance and political will - to acknowledge and reward hard work everywhere it takes place.
Here’s to the next unlock of the American Dream.