In recent years, college campuses have been rocked by black students protesting racial bigotry, and women’s groups denouncing sexual harassment. But in the age of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s class-based politics, we’re beginning to see something new: the rise of low-income and working-class students protesting longstanding inequalities on campus that in the previous decades were mostly ignored.
The new movement took center stage this past weekend as the Harvard College First-Generation Student Union hosted aconference of 350 students and administrators, mostly from Ivy League institutions, that called for boosting the presence of disadvantaged students on elite campuses and reducing their alienation.
Ana Barros, a low-income senior at Harvard, said when she first arrived as a freshman she felt marginalized and out of place in a sea of wealth. As I noted in a speech at the conference, students from the richest quarter of the population outnumber those from the poorest quarter by almost 25 to one at the nation’s most competitive colleges and universities.
[For more of this story, written by Richard D. Kahlenberg, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...ege-students/470664/]
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