Nearly one third of Americans who were raised in the middle class dropped down the economic ladder as adults—and that's before the Great Recession hit.

"Being raised in the middle class is not a guarantee that you'll have that same status as an adult," said Erin Currier, project manager at Pew's Economic Mobility Project. "With all the economic turmoil in the past four years, there's good reason to think that downward mobility is more severe.

Pew looked at children born in the early- to mid-1960s and assessed their economic status roughly 40 years later.

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