Consider Shane Gill, a 33-year-old high-school teacher in New York City. He does not have a car. He does not own a home. He is not married. And he is no anomaly: like hundreds of thousands of others in his generation, he has put off such major purchases or decisions in part because of his debts.

Mr. Gill owes about $45,000 in federal student loans, plus another $40,000 to his parents. That investment in his future has led to a secure job with decent pay and good benefits. But it has left him with tremendous financial constraints, as he faces chipping away at the debt for years on end.

"There's this anxiety: what if I decided I wanted to get married or have children?" Mr. Gill said. "I don't know how I would. And that adds to the sense of precariousness. There's a persistent, buzzing kind of toothache around it."

Annie Lowery, "Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less," New York Times, 10 May 2013: 1+.

Ultimately I'm at Skidmore to change my class, that's why I'm at college, that's why we're all at college, to be able to live comfortably. And it's this weird balance between being open about, 'yes, I'm working class and everything, but at the same time I'm at college because I don't want to be working class, because I want to, when I graduate, work with my mind and sit in a comfortable chair, not working physically, not cleaning peoples toilets, not building their houses or sweeping the streets.' You know I don't want to be doing that and that's why I'm here.

Classless Society Stories Project

Actually, just because [the U.S. is] a democracy, class distinctions have developed with greater rigor than elsewhere, and language, far from coalescing into one great central mass without social distinctions, has developed even more egregious class signals than anyone could have expected.  . . . Interviewed by sociologists, [Americans] indicate that speech is the main way they estimate a stranger's social class when they first encounter him.  "Really," says one deponent, "the first time a person opens his mouth, you can tell."

Fussell, Paul. Class. New York: Ballantine, 1983: 117