I don't think it is, but from talking with my grandfather, who immigrated here penniless in 1960 & became successful, the biggest problem nowadays is an obsession with prior qualifications over character.

So many good people get left behind because of it.

/Small Thread/ https://twitter.com/BenAybar/status/1362434099751829507

He's in his 80s and once argued why young people with a college degree can't make it work, when he came here without one OR money and managed to do so.

The biggest thing now seems to be a lack of entry-level jobs and obsessions with resume qualifications over character.

If you're born into fortunate circumstances, no matter how good of a person you are, you're more likely to land quality internships or get connections for better jobs instantly.

Without those opportunities, it's hard to get a job after college that asks for years of experience.

The people left behind by this the most are immigrants and poorer people, who have far fewer connections when it comes to high-paying jobs. And with more people working for massive companies than before, bosses are more concerned about productivity than image.

60 years ago, far more employees directly interacted with customers than now, thanks to the internet and easier long-distance communication. It's a lot easier to be a jerk if you have qualifications, are confined to some office and customers won't complain about you.

When a customer sees someone face-to-face, will they first think about how many years of experience someone has, or how they're treated as a person by the employee?

Since there's fewer and fewer of these jobs, good-hearted people are often looked over due to shorter resumes.

So yes, in a way the American Dream has become significantly harder, especially for those not born here. It's obviously still possible, but character is valued less than internships and obsessive amounts of supposed qualifications than it was decades prior.

/End

BTW, in my grandfather's case, he was a reporter in Singapore, came here, wasn't hired because Americans considered his foreign qualifications meaningless, & did manual labor/salesman jobs for years before he married my software programmer grandmother & learned her line of work