Harvard Is Vaulting Workers Into the Middle Class With High Pay. Can Anyone Else Follow Its Lead?

"Coming to the United States was the best decision I ever made," Ms. Bonilla said.

Martha Bonilla is not your typical middle-class worker. And it’s not just that she was born in a backwater of El Salvador and crossed Mexico hidden among a pile of bananas in the back of a truck to make her way illegally into the United States at age 20.

Like millions of Americans lacking a college degree, the 44-year-old mother of three works on the bottom rungs of the service sector, in a kitchen run by the food-service contractor Restaurant Associates in Cambridge, Mass. Food preparation and service is the lowest-paid occupational group in the economy; even in Boston, it typically pays less than $27,000 for a full-time, year-round job.

Yet there Ms. Bonilla sits at her kitchen table in the solidly middle-class neighborhood of West Roxbury. She and her husband, Felipe Villatoro, both legal residents, bought the house 12 years ago for $350,000. It’s their second; she rents the first to members of her extended family. The vacations in Florida, the 401(k), the $1,700 a month they pay for their daughter’s college tuition and fees — all speak of America’s dream.

By Eduardo Porter