by: Sam Gruetter
Editor in Chief

Ironmans are one of the most difficult and tiring athletic events: a triathlon that features a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile run. In 2015, the World Triathlon Corporation surveyed Ironman finishers, concluding that their average income was $247,000, while the average income in the US as of 2015 was $56,500, about a quarter of Ironman finishers. This figure begs the question: Do the economic privileges of many competitors speak to the privilege and access necessary to complete such a difficult task, or did the same drive and endurance help them achieve both their Ironman and financial success? While the Ironman statistic is an incredibly simplified representation of this scenario, society needs to recognize that in our current hustle culture, privilege enables the pursuit of ambition.

The ability to pursue one’s dreams and ambitions may seem like an innate part of the American dream; after all, the US is branded as the land of opportunity. However, what many people neglect is the fact that ambition is a privilege in and of itself. The intergenerational income elasticity (IGE) measures income mobility across generations, with a value of one indicating the least mobility and zero being the most. According to VoxEU’s Center for Economic Policy Research, the IGE for the lowest third of tax brackets is 0.6% while it is 0.5% for the highest tax brackets, essentially meaning that, across generations, it is most common for the rich to stay rich and the poor to stay poor. Furthermore, education and race also influence IGEs. According to the same study, when people had similar education levels, parental income still made a 27.4% difference in their IGE. The role of education as a means of ensuring the transition of wealth can be explained by wealthy individuals’ advantaged abilities to provide access to internships, counselors, and even better schools than those available to people with lower incomes. While students still require ambition to attend top universities and achieve future financial success, their access enables them to “dream big”.

The academic mismatch theory is another example of the hindrance of educational and economic disadvantages to the realistic fruition of pursuing higher education. The theory describes when students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds attend top universities due to affirmative action programs and typically struggle, fail their classes, or drop out altogether. These students obviously possess the ambition to attend such schools, but lack the resources and foundation to thrive in environments for which they are unprepared. The “American dream”, a concept that attracts people to the opportunities the U.S. provides, fails to acknowledge how the pursuit of success is attainable for the few and unrealistic for the many.

(Sources: Institute of Education Sciences, Manhattan Institute, United States Census Bureau)