Social Stratification | [Your Name]Sociology |

“Social stratification is a system by which a society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy, so that some people have more money, power, and prestige that others.” (Macionis, 2012, p. 242) Like all societies, the United States is stratified, and this stratification is often based on a person’s socioeconomic status. The number of years a person spends in school, plus the prestige of his or her occupation, plus the amount of money he or she makes, determine one’s social class. While this method of dividing up the population into classes might be useful, it has several shortcomings.
One determinant of socioeconomic status is education. People with a high school degree are classified in one group. People with college degrees are put into another. Using educational attainment levels to indicate SES is problematic for two reasons. School systems in this country are not uniform in quality and not everyone has equal access to primary, secondary, and higher education. The reliance on educational level as an indicator of social class becomes more problematic when one considers the huge variety of colleges in the United States. There are vocational schools, junior colleges, four-year colleges, and universities. Some colleges prepare individuals for specific careers, whereas others emphasize the development of intellectual and life skills.
Occupational prestige is very subjective and varies from country to country. “In the United States, as in most industrialized societies, jobs requiring extensive schooling are considered the most prestigious.” (Ellis, 1993) Jobs requiring manual labor, or in which a person serves or cleans up after others, tend to be low-prestige occupations. Using one’s occupation as a partial measure of social class has another pitfall. It assumes that people are doing the kinds of work they prefer and for which they are best prepared. In a full market employment economy, people can generally find the kinds of work they want, but in a weak economy, people sometimes have to take jobs that do not reflect their interests, education, or experience. Using occupation to place people in a certain social class reflects our society’s bias. American society automatically accords some jobs more prestige than others. This does not mean that they are better occupations or that the people who do them are more worthy individuals.
I do believe that having some social stratification in our society is beneficial. Giving more prestige and wealth to jobs that require more skill and learning will lure people away from less important work with greater benefits and rewards. There would be no reason to excel in your field or go to school longer if everyone was rewarded equally. However, I do feels as though our society would benefit from bridging the gap between the super wealthy and the poor. This closing of the gap would be extremely beneficial to many of the poor people in our country in providing better paying jobs and greater access to more schooling. Tax the rich and give to the poor.
Throughout my life I have run into a few examples of social stratification. Given that I was a white male growing up in a lower middle class family, I had access to a good public school up until I graduated high school. After that, I did not have the family prestige or wealth to go to a prestigious Ivy League school. I could barely afford to go to a 4 year in-state college. Then I did what a lot of lower middle class people do, I joined the military. Since I did not have the status or wealth given to me, I had to work harder, like every other person who is not born into money.

References
Macionis, J. J. , (2012) Sociology (14th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.
Ellis, L. , (1993) Social stratification and socioeconomic inequality: Vol. 1: A comparative biosocial analysis. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.