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losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage loss that it used to be.”
    To be sure, it is vastly better to have a college degree than to lack one. Indeed, the return on a four-year degree is near its historic high. But that’s largely because the prospects facing people without a college degree have been flat or falling. Throughout the aughts,incomes for college graduates barely budged. In a decade defined by setbacks, perhaps that should occasion a sort of wan celebration. “College graduates aren’t doing
badly,
” says Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on inequality. But “all the action in earnings is above the B.A. level.”
    America’s classes are separating and changing. A tiny elite continues to float up and away from everyone else. Meanwhile, as manufacturing jobs and semiskilled office positions disappear, much of what the United States has historically regarded as its middle class isin danger of drifting downward. Left in between is what might be thought of as the professional middle class—unexceptional college graduates, for whom the arrow of fortune points mostly sideways, and an upper tier of college graduates and postgraduates for whom it points progressively upward, but not spectacularly so.
    If you live and work in the professional communities of Boston or Seattle or Silicon Valley or Washington, DC, it is easy to forget that even among people age twenty-five to thirty-four,college graduates make up only about 30 percent of the population. And it is also easy to forget that afamily income of $113,000 in 2009 would have put you in the eightieth income percentile nationally, or that $200,000 would have put you in the ninety-fifth percentile. The professional middle class is too privileged for pity, but it has its own distinct worries and character, and its restlessness has shaped the political reaction to the crash.
    T HE SAME FORCES that have driven the separation of America’s classes have also pushed men and women in different directions. As the middle class has hollowed over the past twenty years, both low-skill service jobs and high-skill, high-paying jobs have grown—and in roughly equal measure. But, as Autor notes, the sexes have not been equally affected: overwhelmingly, women have moved up from the dwindling middle. Men have been much more prone than women to move down, if not out.
    Men still make more money than women on average, partly because of lingering discrimination. But the gap has been closing, in part because women have done so much better than men in the classroom in recent decades.The share of the male population receiving a college degree has been basically flat since 1980. In 2010,for every two men who graduated from college, three women did the same. Most managers in the United States are now women. And according to the research firm Reach Advisors, in 2008, among childlesssingles age twenty-two to thirty,women earned more than men in thirty-nine of the fifty largest cities in the country, largely because they were so much better educated.
    In the long run, what is perhaps as significant as the trend in wages is the trend in work itself. Soon after the crash, women became a majority of workers for the first time in American history (though they’ve traded places with men several times in the months since then). That’s not primarily because women have been streaming into the workforce; growth in women’s employment has slowed in the past ten years, following rapid gains beginning in the 1970s.It’s the opposite trend that is still going strong. Men have been gradually moving out of the workforce since the