New Trier Township: What Class Are We Really?

In American Studies we are currently studying class and classism. To begin this unit, we were asked to take a survey about class. One of the questions was "To which class/ group to you belong?" (Upper, middle, and lower class were the only options). About 75% of the class reported that they were upper class, and the other 25% reported that they were middle class. But what class do most students at New Trier belong to? (In this post I will focus mostly on Kenilworth for statistics and examples).

One of the major influences on class is income. The "top 5%" of Americans make more than $150,000 annually, and the "top 1%" of Americans make over $250,000 annually. These groups, and even people a little below, are what society considers the upper class of America. And in the New Trier Township, an overwhelming number of people fall into this category. In Winnetka (60093), the median income is $122,100; in Glencoe (60022), it is $145,300, and in Kenilworth (60043), the median household income is $205,300. The average household income in Kenilworth is $346,686. These are just the median incomes; there are clearly a huge number of families that fall into the top 5% and 1%; the rest fall very shortly behind. The New Trier Township's median incomes indicate that the vast majority of families here are upper class.

Another influence on class is one's peer group, the community: a similarity in occupation, education, income and occupational prestige. Out of the 2,522 people in Kenilworth, 44.9 percent have a Bachelor's degree and 40.7 percent have a Graduate degree. In Melrose Park, Illinois, however, only 10.1 percent of people have a Bachelor's degree or higher. As for "occupational prestige," 68.1 percent of (working) people in Kenilworth have a white collar job, and the other 39.1 percent have blue collar jobs. In the New Trier township, the majority of adults are highly educated and work very prestigious jobs with high incomes, which are all great indicators of class.

We also learned in class that marriage is becoming more and more something that the rich do and the lower class tend not to do. If this is truly the case, the marriage statistics for the North Shore tell something about our class. In Kenilworth, 71.7 percent of adults are married. By contrast, only 43 percent of adults in Maywood, another Chicago suburb, are married. If marriage status is truly an indicator of class, the North Shore seems to be upper class.

There are many influences on class, and the overwhelming majority of the New Trier Township seems to be upper class based on these influences. So why didn't more people report that they are from an upper class family? Do they not want to admit it, or did they really think their family is middle class?