About time . . .
It's hard to spot one of the most underrepresented minority groups at many four-year colleges: students and faculty members from the working class.
Efforts to promote campus diversity have tended to gloss over them, focusing instead on members of racial and ethnic minority groups, whose presence or absence is easier to detect. What little research has been done on working-class students and academics—mainly small-scale, qualitative studies based heavily on interviews or personal essays—has found that they generally try to fit in rather than draw attention to their backgrounds.
Complicating discussions of such faculty members and students is the lack of a universal definition of what "working class" means. Although the term has typically been used to refer to people who earn a living through physical labor, it can also apply to white-collar workers with incomes below the mean.
Education policy makers often consider being part of the first generation of one's family to attend college as a rough proxy for having a working-class background. According to Education Department data, students with parents without any education beyond high school account for about 36 percent of all enrollment at postsecondary institutions, with most being concentrated at less-competitive four-year colleges, two-year colleges, and proprietary institutions.
http://chronicle.com/article/Socioeconomic-Class-Gains/124446/?key=TjogcF9rYSRFNn5rOj5CYDlda3ZgMU4kZXFKa3gsbl1cGA%3D%3D