> I don't think you're truly economically "upper class" if you have to worry about student loans.
If you have to worry about student loans, you probably aren't even middle class (petit bourgeois) even if you are middle or substantially higher income; people with student loan concerns are, almost by definition, members of the proletarian intelligentsia—knowledge-workers, often relatively well paid compared to the rest of the working class, whose primary source of support is selling labor for wages. The petit bourgeois have a balance between labor and capital contributions to income (most classically applying primarily their own labor to their own capital, but a common modern variation is having nontrivial capital investments but also a significant contribution from selling labor for wages.) And the upper class, the haut bourgeois, derive gains primarily from capital to which other people’s labor is applied.
Most people in the US do not think this way, though. Most people in the US feel that if they have 2-3 nice cars and a big house in the suburbs they are upper middle class. (2-3 not-nice cars then lower middle class.) American define class by possessions, often, and then see those possessions as providing security -- which is the false equivalence that your comment starts to get at.
Under this definition, presumably a house flipper doing all their own decorating would be petit bourgeois (applying their own labor to their own capital), while a senior manager earning $500,000/year at Google would be proleteriat (selling their labor for wages)?
> Under this definition, presumably a house flipper doing all their own decorating would be petit bourgeois
In the economic analysis on which the traditional class distinctions are based, the homes owned transitorily by a flipper would seem to be (well, aside from the land component, which is also not capital) a very expensive raw material, not really capital (they aren't tools used in the course of producing goods for sale.) So this is certainly a point where there could be different opinions, but, sure, that's probably arguably correct.
> while a senior manager earning $500,000/year at Google would be proleteriat (selling their labor for wages)?
A senior manager earning $500,000/yr at Google is likely investing quite a bit of that, and likely has been during the series of highly-paid jobs they had prior to becoming a senior manager, and very often would fit the alternate petit bourgeois pattern discussed in the parenthetical in GP, where a significant fraction of their gains are from ownership (indirectly through financial instruments) of capital, though they also have significant income from selling labor. But, sure, it's possible for them to just be a highly paid member of the proletarian intelligentsia.
If you have to worry about student loans, you probably aren't even middle class (petit bourgeois) even if you are middle or substantially higher income; people with student loan concerns are, almost by definition, members of the proletarian intelligentsia—knowledge-workers, often relatively well paid compared to the rest of the working class, whose primary source of support is selling labor for wages. The petit bourgeois have a balance between labor and capital contributions to income (most classically applying primarily their own labor to their own capital, but a common modern variation is having nontrivial capital investments but also a significant contribution from selling labor for wages.) And the upper class, the haut bourgeois, derive gains primarily from capital to which other people’s labor is applied.