The Only Way to "Climb the Ladder"

This will be interesting I think to many of you though perhaps not in line with our current goal of academic blogging and trying to tie all our posts together. It is somewhat random but really interesting.

According to my Political Science professor this semester, we all think we're middle class and we're all actually somewhere in the lower class. Professor Coffey (sweet older guy) says that middle class starts with a salary of about $250,000 (Say what?!) and the reason many families think they're there is because they're getting closer to that mark with a joint income (both parents working). And I thought I had it made at age 16 when Subway gave me a $0.50 raise from minimum wage. 

Image courtesy of Christop | flickr

Dr. Coffey, my polysci prof, also informed us that the only sure way to ascend socio-economic classes is education (you know ... unless you create facebook).  This leads me to an interesting link I found by following BYU IPT professor, Dr. David Wiley on twitter. The link (click here) displays a dynamic graphic that shows you the median income of each college major based on U.S. Census Bureau data. Pretty incredible. The thing I found most interesting is that not a one of these median bachelor salaries exceeds 120K. So how much education do you really need to climb the ladder?