Only about a third of U.S. adults believe the American dream is still alive, a Wall Street Journal / NORC poll published Wednesday found.
A survey of 2,501 people conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute twelve years ago found more than half of respondents believed the American dream “still holds true,” but now only a third feel that way, according to a recent WSJ/NORC poll of 1,502 adults. The study also found an increasingly large gap between people’s economic goals and what they think is actually attainable — a trend that was consistent across gender and party lines, but was especially common amongst younger generations.
“Key aspects of the American Dream seem out of reach in a way that they were not in past generations,” Emerson Sprick, an economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told the WSJ.