I've fairly average, but I'm young and just starting out I guess. Once I complete university I seem to be highly above average :S
My recent post Studies and being above the rest

I think in the U.S., and probably Canada, too, there's this feeling that everyone is middle class — well, at least us and everyone we know is "us". There is very little talk about "working class" or "upper class". Politicians rarely mentioned either. I listened to the U.S. presidential debates last election and "middle class" got mentioned, but only middle class. Everyone thinks they are middle class. And some people will even say that we live in a class-less society. That's far from the case.

I grew up among working class people and knew some people who were just plain poor (i.e. no reliable running water, large holes in the floor of their trailers). I think many of us also thought we were middle class, but when I was finally around real middle class people it was actually pretty shocking. It was shocking because 1. I didn't know so many people actually lived like that, and 2. they also seemed completely oblivious to how many people didn't live like them. I remember in college hearing people talking about how "Well, those people are poor because they're lazy. They just didn't want to go to college like the rest of us." But where I grew up, college wasn't even something that was mentioned much, even in school. People talked about going into the military far more than going to college. College was only really pushed on the top students who could get big scholarships, and I remember how much I had to push to find out information about college requirements in time. Sometimes it seemed that no one knew what was involved in actually getting into college. Good, smart, hardworking people fell through the cracks.

And then there were just the facts of everyday life, especially living in a rural area. There were very few businesses in the area, so very few choices for shopping or work. Hardly anything was in walking distance. There was no public transportation. In my own family I have a cousin who has been trying to go to a community college but had to stop because his vehicle broke and he didn't have the money to fix it and he had a hard time finding any work without a vehicle. That's what it means to be working class — to be just a small emergency away from financial disaster, the kind of small emergencies that middle class people see as merely an inconvenience but which keep working class people from getting out of the hole.

I know in Australia, you're initially seen as lower class if you don't go to uni (you can work your way up without one, of course). It's pretty much a middle class, upwards, thing to do. I wouldn't call it upper class, but perhaps that's because in Australia we've got a pretty good post-paid system of interest-free government loans that you pay once you earn over $40,000~