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Among the sons and daughters of the suburbs and the country club set, the recession turned good times to bad.
Their less-accomplished peers, who didn't make it through college or who never even made it to campus, have seen dismal prospects go from bad to awful.
These are the workers for whom the misery of the recession comes in torrents.
In better times "they'd get the worst jobs," said John Hornbeck of Episcopal Community Services in Kansas City. "Now the barrier is just a flat-out lack of jobs, period."
Certainly, millions of the young and lightly educated find ways to make a living in menial jobs. But the struggles of those who can't get work pose an extra burden for the economy — in fewer people paying taxes, more needing government handouts and, perhaps, growing crime.
They "run through their unemployment ... then some of them get into legal trouble," said Christopher Jencks, who studies poverty issues at Harvard University. "Society picks up not all of the broken glass, but some of it. We share the cost with the victims."
At the recession's bottom in 2009, unemployment swelled to about 10 percent. But for blue-collar workers, the rate was closer to 17 percent.
For a less definable class of young people who aspire to blue-collar work and no more, the buzz-kill economy looks especially bleak.
This group lacks both formal training and so-called soft skills — such as the ability to look a boss in the eye or to understand they should show up at 8:50, not 9ish for a job that starts at 9 a.m.
They make up a disproportionate number of the 6.8 million Americans who aren't just unemployed but who have been on the hunt for work for a year or longer. The previous high for the long-term unemployed, since the number was first tracked in 1948, was 3 million during the dreary days of the early 1980s.
"The old manufacturing economy honed physical skills such as lifting and manual dexterity," wrote Richard Florida in The Great Reset.
"But two sets of skills matter more now, analytical skills ... and social intelligence skills."
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The cost of dropping out • The long-term jobless rate ignores those who have taken unending job rejections as a sign to simply to stop asking.
"We hear they just need to pick themselves up and get a job," said Dennis Chapman, the development director at City Union Mission in Kansas City. "That's easier said than done."
One study in Missouri found that each high school dropout costs the state $4,000 a year in lost taxes and higher Medicaid and prison costs. Another estimated that the U.S. economy would miss out on $335 billion in lifetime earnings, compared with what it would reap had the high school dropouts of 2009 earned their diplomas.
Jencks, the Harvard poverty scholar, is quick to point out that experts have yet to find a consensus on whether rising joblessness cranks up crime rates. For the most accurately tracked crimes like murder, the correlation is weak. Lesser crimes are tracked less closely, but as Jencks observes, "If you look at people in trouble with the law, an awful lot of them are out of work."
More critically, Jencks said, those at the bottom rungs in an extended recession may be so cut off from a work-a-day existence that they won't bounce back even when the job market turns around.
Statistics show they tend to delay marriage but not children. So this downturn might amp up the number of single moms who, on average, lean on their families and the government to make the rent and stock the pantry.
At a key time in their lives, these would-be workers aren't developing work habits. And they're not making the connections to the mainstream of society they'll need to achieve independence. They risk, Jencks said, slipping into a permanent situation that doesn't fit with any American sense of success.
"After having been rejected 25 times, it gets hard to make the 26th call," he said. "They're the people who would have got factory jobs years ago. But they may be in danger of falling out of touch with the rest of us."
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Tough for those on the bottom • Zachary Brame sheepishly grins when asked what he does with his time. Spends it on the computer. Playing games or studying Japanese to better appreciate Japanese animation. In his parents' basement. It's not where he wants or plans to be. But the path to escape, to independence, hasn't shown up yet.
He graduated from Sumner Academy in Kansas City in 2007. Like so many teenage boys of his generation, he has always been game for computer and video games. That took him to Tempe, Ariz., and the University of Advancing Technology to learn how to create games. He did well on general education classes and beginner courses on fashioning virtual environments.
Then the economy nose-dived, and he calculated his prospects of actually making a salary that could handle the roughly $60,000 in debt he would have upon graduation. Suddenly, the math didn't work.
"As the money went through my hands it was getting more upsetting," Brame said.
He returned to Kansas City in spring 2008, working with his carpenter father framing houses and then laboring in a warehouse. But the work was spotty and not something he could see himself doing for months, much less years.
So he was back pounding the streets. This summer he landed in a monthlong course to certify as a computer technician — picking up geeky know-how for plugging in motherboards and keyboarding around viruses.
This is a guy habitually without cash, dependent on a free bus pass, who waited weeks to save up money for the test that would vouch for his computer bona fides. His certification, he hopes, might mean a steady paycheck.
"It's just terrible waiting and hoping all the time," Brame said. "It gets old."
As executive director of Workforce Partnership — a collection of career centers around Kansas City — Scott Anglemyer sees the frustration.
The entry-level landscape is tough for those at the bottom "no matter what," he said. "Now it's several orders of magnitude harder."
The demand for workers with minimal education and skills has been steadily dropping at least since the 1970s, as the U.S. economy has slowly shed its manufacturing jobs.
"It used to be that the high school degree was your ticket to a manual job, a semi-skilled job that paid really well and bought you and your dependents a middle-class existence," said Joel Devine, a Tulane University sociologist. "Not anymore."
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No job without experience • Schakia Odums pulled down mostly B's as a student. She liked math and had a good enough ear for music to excel at the double bass.
As she neared graduation from Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts in Kansas City in 2009, she pictured herself going to college and securing an accounting degree from Grambling State University or the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
But her family couldn't get the money together. Efforts to nail down a scholarship — her 16 on the ACT would make acceptance to many colleges iffy — produced nothing.
So she went to Louisiana, where she had spent her grade-school years, to live with her father and work for several months carting food orders to cars at a Sonic franchise.
Then she returned to Kansas City to be with her mother and spent four months working at a KFC restaurant. But she felt she was being asked to do too many things and left.
She launched a frustrating search for some other way to make a living in telemarketing or "customer service." She was told again and again she didn't have experience.
So in September she went to see a military recruiter. Now she's excited about joining the Army and about the promise it offers her of training as a dental hygienist:
The idea of combat "doesn't bother me as much as it might bother someone else. ... Anything that takes my mind off things will be good."
After all, she has spent the past few months at a homeless shelter, looking for any work.
"This is what I've got," she said. "I'm going to make something out of it."