Moving into and staying in the American middle class has become more challenging over time-but there's no single culprit. In this Perspective, the authors discuss a number of subtle but important changes over a relatively long period that have blocked many middle-class pathways. Less-educated workers face a smaller set of middle-income jobs. The good jobs that remain have increased educational requirements. The American labor market has been hollowed out. Those who are employed hold jobs that are less stable, provide fewer benefits, and may not lead to longer-term careers within a company. There is a lack of internal infrastructure to invest in workers, particularly those in roles most susceptible to automation. Consequently, sustained effort toward building new pathways will take many years. The authors conclude by providing a series of potential starting points.

"As the Army reduces its end strength, the number of soldiers leaving the Regular Army has increased, raising concerns about unemployment and other transition problems for these veterans. To help improve the Army's transition assistance process, the authors of this report administered civilian occupation surveys to soldiers in selected Army military occupational specialties (MOSs) to assess the level and importance of the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) needed in these MOSs and to develop better crosswalks between military and civilian occupations. The authors also identified and separately analyzed survey questions associated with soft skills, such as leadership, teamwork, and attention to detail, to assist soldiers with translating their Army experience for civilian employers. The occupation surveys generated a rich database that was used to characterize the KSAs needed by Army soldiers to perform their MOSs, as well as other occupation attributes, such as work activities, work context, and work style. Furthermore, the crosswalks generated from the survey responses identified both a broader range of military-civilian occupation matches and higher-quality matches than existing crosswalks. Based on these results, we recommend that the Army communicate information about these job matches to both soldiers and potential employers and that it expand use of the occupation surveys to develop crosswalks for additional MOSs"--Publisher's description.

The link between unemployment and pension accumulations is conceptually straightforward; periods of unemployment lead to lower pension contributions, and thus to lower accumulations. However, impacts on accumulation may differ as a result of the timing and frequency of unemployment spells. We hypothesize that unemployment is more likely during periods in which the equities market experiences greater than average returns, largely due to a lead/lag structure of the stock and labor markets, respectively. This would imply that workers may systematically miss opportunities to purchase equities through DC plans when prices are relatively low. To test this hypothesis, we match historic stock returns to stochastically generated unemployment spells for men and women across the earnings distribution. We find lower income workers suffer greater percentage losses in retirement savings as a result of more frequent spells of unemployment. Higher income worker losses are more greatly affected by the timing of unemployment relative to the equities market.

Residents of the Pittsburgh area have many local options for pursuing education and training to prepare for science- and technology-focused (STF) jobs. These options include colleges and universities, technical schools, coding boot camps, and workforce development centers. In this online tool, RAND researchers compiled a list of STF providers and programs in the Pittsburgh area. The tool includes information on costs; whether remote, part-time, or evening programs are available; and whether funding may be available. Potential students can filter the list by county, credential type, and occupational group (e.g., engineering, health, computing and math) to find out which types of degrees or certificates can be earned in which STF fields.

Each year, about 200,000 U.S. service members leave active duty and transition to civilian employment. Many of these service members find this transition difficult because some military occupations have no direct parallel in the civilian economy. In a previous study, researchers at the RAND Corporation developed a method of matching occupational characteristics from the civilian economy to occupations in the U.S. Army. In this report, the authors extend that method to the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. The authors collected data from more than 5,100 active component enlisted personnel across the three service branches using the U.S. Department of Labor's (DoL's) Occupational Information Network (O*NET) survey. For each military occupation surveyed, the authors identified the most-similar civilian occupations by comparing service members' responses to the O*NET survey items with the responses that DoL obtained on those same survey items for almost 1,000 civilian occupations. This approach contrasts with existing methods for generating military-to-civilian occupation crosswalks, which rely on analyses of high-level job descriptions by occupational analysts. The authors were able to algorithmically match a military occupation to every civilian occupation and determine the best fit. The job-matching algorithm provides both high-quality occupational recommendations for each military occupation and the reasons that those matches are high quality. These results will be useful for service members who are leaving the military in search of civilian employment, job counselors, and employers in search of workers with specific skill sets.

Many people who self-identify as middle class think of themselves as lower or upper middle class, yet this would classify nearly all Americans as middle class. Researchers often use other concepts to define the term: the middle 60 percent of the income distribution and earning thresholds, such as 75 to 200 percent of median income. This Perspective describes how, under these definitions, the U.S. middle class has been either receiving less income (as a share of total) or shrinking in size (proportion of the population) since the 1970s and is now smaller than middle-class populations in comparable countries. Another point of concern is research showing an increasing likelihood that lower-income Americans and their children will remain stuck outside the middle class with limited opportunities for upward mobility.

This paper documents variation in working conditions among workers in the United States, presents new estimates of how workers value these conditions, and assesses the impact of working conditions on estimates of the wage structure and inequality. We use evidence from a series of stated-preference experiments to estimate workers' willingness-to-pay for a broad set of job characteristics, which we validate with actual job choices. We find that working conditions vary substantially across workers, play a significant role in job choice decisions, and are central components of the compensation received by workers. Preferences vary by demographic groups and throughout the wage distribution. We find that accounting for differences in preferences for working conditions often exacerbates wage differentials by race, age, and education, and intensifies measures of wage inequality.