Are impoverished Americans a caste?
Spoilers yes they are (also systemic racism is in the mix but on some level you already knew that).
So almost a quarter of newborn American children belong to the caste no college degree with only a 20% chance of escaping via education.
You can escape by marriage but it is equally difficult. If you are a woman without a college degree you will have trouble getting married at all much less to a man with a college degree.
If you are a man without a college degree, you maybe can marry a woman with a college degree if you earn enough.
The problem is in early 2026, a man in the U.S. with only a high school diploma typically earns a median of about $47,000–$47,600 per year.
However a child adopted by well educated parents has almost triple the chances of achieving a college degree. In large-scale longitudinal studies (such as the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study), approximately 55.8% to 58.7% of children adopted into high-education households earn a college degree. That’s incredibly high given that a child up for adoption might have health conditions which impair studying or join his new family later in life.
Is culture to blame?
Traditionally evidence of a caste system is first denied and then, when that fails, there is an attempt to patch up the meritocracy by blaming culture. Unfortunately:
Data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) identifies cost as the single most significant factor preventing first-generation students from completing their degrees.
Plus:
Students whose parents have no college experience are disproportionately funneled into 2-year public institutions (53%) or for-profit schools (18%), which often have lower graduation rates and higher debt-to-income ratios than the 4-year non-profit institutions attended by the children of degree holders.
So not surprisingly the caste system is mostly upheld by lack of funds and not lack of culture.
Racially this caste is fairly diverse.
However the mechanisms used to sustain this caste are based on traditional black / white racism and stay in place because no one feels enough empathy with this caste to remove them. That is to say this caste is systemic racism in action despite affecting whites at lower percentages.
For instance college educated people live in neighborhoods that non college educated cannot afford — a carry over of traditional redlining racism. Plus school funding like Prop. 13 in California insure that these segregated areas taxes do not go to poorer areas.
Prop. 13 was put in place by racists and it stays in place despite its obvious racial impact. The no college caste sustains because it works for racists (2015 article but recent research still supports the findings):
White women are more than twice as likely as their black counterparts (29% vs 13%) to be married to a spouse of equal or greater educational status.
That 2 to 1 ratio roughly holds for children recently born into this caste:
Trump is very open about his racism so any diversity initiative to help lessen the racial impact of the no college caste had to go:
Federal TRIO programs experienced significant funding disruptions, with roughly 120 programs losing grants in late 2025 due to administration actions targeting DEI-related initiatives, though a federal judge issued an injunction in January 2026 to pause these cuts. While the 2027 budget proposes total elimination, Congress has historically maintained funding.
Note here even Trump basically admits its not about culture, because if it were then stopping financial aid to non-white students would not be important enough to take to court.
Studies have found that TRIO programs can raise the probability of Bachelor’s degree completion for low-income, first-generation students from roughly 6% to 15% (for Talent Search) or to 21% (for Upward Bound).
The no college caste is just the latest in a long line of “racism done right” attempts in America.
As of 2023, approximately 26.2% of Black Americans aged 25 or older have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, an increase from 19.3% in 2013. While attainment is growing, it remains below the national average of 34.8%. The 6-year completion rate for Black students at four-year institutions is roughly 40–46%, often hindered by financial constraints and work responsibilities.
One problem with racism done right is that it’s very difficult to suppress a caste without negatively impacting people not in the caste. For instance slavery negatively impacted white workers in the North by forcing them to sometimes compete with zero wage workers.
So now we have a similar dynamic with high college costs keeping the predominantly non-white no college caste going, but at the same time
Total U.S. student loan debt has exploded, surpassing $1.7 trillion to nearly $1.83 trillion by late 2025, with federal loan debt alone more than tripling since 2007. The balance has increased by over 267% since 2006, averaging an annual growth rate of 7.03% due to high college costs, compounding interest, and increased graduate school borrowing.
Another problem with racism done right is that it has to hide the fact it has created a caste system. For instance one of the factors in desegregation was “The Doll Test” in Brown v. Board of Education.
Once a system starts negatively impacting the self esteem of its members, it becomes harder to hide its a caste system.
If the no college caste realizes its a caste then the one parent with some college caste might as well. Suddenly you could have 53% of Americans identifying themselves as oppressed.
So Trump must play this bizarre against DEI and woke and immigrants (and Iran?!?) hide the caste system game. Good luck with that.