The US median income is about $37,000 currently. Among the highest in the world. You can earn that in just about every state in routine jobs that millions of people work (thus median). It also means you can very likely earn that income without a four year degree (since after all only 33.4% [1] of Americans now have bachelor degrees and their median income is around $60,000 now per the BLS).

Now combine two median incomes. You can very easily earn $80,000+ in a household, doing routine jobs without a bachelor's degree (a high school diploma is required), in thousands of typical mid-size locations in the US that are dramatically less expensive to live than the coastal cities.

Meanwhile, job openings have jumped to an all-time high.[2] While the supply of labor is at a very low level.

Pairing two median incomes delivers an upper middle class life, and does so easily given just a few years of continued improvement after reaching the median. That enables you to buy a good house in those other parts of the country (99% of the nation that is) and it enables you to live quite well if you're at all prudent. So there's your target: figure out how to get into the top 50% among the employed, not exactly a high bar.

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/326995-census-more-a...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/job-openi...

It may not seem high to you, but to those in the bottom quartile, it may seem impossibly high, with no clear path in anything approaching the right direction.

That statistic seems kind of random. I have a bachelor degree and was definitely not pulling upper middle class on it (liberal arts degree) until I went to a bootcamp and switched careers into web dev.

I think the "32% of Americans have bachelor degrees" factoid is not meant to say that "everyone who gets a degree is upper-middle class" but that "a bachelor degree is _usually_ a gate/hoop you have to get through in order to have a good chance of being upper-middle class, and only 32% of Americans get through that filter."