"I went through college throughout my adultlife," he reflects, "I didn't just go get it. I started when I was twenty-two. I would go to work, and I would have to quit school sometimes and work more hours. It took me about ten years on and off." With three children to raise - a daughter who is eighteen, and two sons, fifteen and ten - going to school full time wasn't an option, though he hopes his kids will go awayto college and do it all at once, for the experience. About hsi degree, he adds, "It hasn't helped me very much yet."

Michael's extended efforts to obtain a degree from a for-profit college give me pause, because it's an indicator that the established paths to middle-class life in America aren't working for him. [...] The rise of useless college degrees is a clear signal that the established systems of social mobility have failed in Ameria, and the gulf of oppurtiity is part of what makes jobs in the sharing economy appealing. Technology in the sharing or gig economy is framed as an intervention in the declining pathways toward upward class mobility.