Approximately 50 students crowded into an Alpena Community College classroom Thursday to ponder whether the American dream is still attainable.
Four instructors held a forum to discuss the growing "Plight of the Middle Class" and spoke to students about the growing discrepancies of wealth between social classes and how the middle class is disappearing.
The students learned that wealth and discrepancies in wealth have reached unprecedented levels and standard wages and job losses are the root cause of middle class Americans falling into the lower class.
"I think that the value of this experience was that we are at a critical state in this country's evolution and the critical state is the awareness of the middle class about precisely how it's being squeezed; how it's being challenged," political science instructor Tim Kuehnlein said.
The idea for the forum came from economics and political science instructor Anip Uppal, who wanted to impact public knowledge.
"The middle class is the benchmark of an economy. The reason America is the biggest economy by far in the world is because of the middle class," he said.
Sociology instructor Josephine Bitler said when she asks her students to write down if they think they're middle class. She said about 100 percent of her students will write yes, but said that 95 percent of the time they're incorrect.
Anthropology instructor Matt Dunckel said in the 1980s corporate income tax was 15.28 percent but decreased to 7.9 percent in 2005. He told students innovation, investment and healing capital - not tax cuts - is what creates wealth.
Students elicited a positive response to the forum and asked numerous questions including what they can do as individuals to ensure the survival of the middle class.
The instructors told students to vote, write their legislators, invest in higher education and not to take information they receive from the media and politicians at face value but to seek the answers themselves.
Kuehnlein said the forum was geared toward students to get them thinking about these kinds of issues because they are the future of the middle class and if they're not conscious about what challenges face them, there's not much hope for that middle class to be sustained.
He said it's not about achieving total equality but making sure that a broad spectrum of people can sustain the highest quality of life relative to the highest level of the socio-economic spectrum. He said if Americans lose that, it will result in levels of instability he doesn't think this country wants to experience.
Kuehnlein said the forum was tremendously successful and the college most likely will be hosting more of them,
Crystal Nelson can be reached via e-mail at cnelson@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5693.