Well all new nurses as of last year are graduates - the rest of them are a mix of graduates and non-graduates.

Anyway - I doubt many nurses were privately educated, they aren't well paid and are unlikely to come from families with their own money.

And almost 50% of young people are graduates - they can't all be middle class.

Basically I think Americans think of this as middle class http://bite-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07..., where in the UK we think of this as middle class http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/files/2010/11/middleton-pa....

I'm not saying we're richer or posher than Americans - just that our definition of middle class is different.

I think you'll find that your idea of middle class is closer to what is normally regarded in the UK as upper middle class. See, for example, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_Britain