“The time for quietly enduring discrimination on college campuses is over. 

From the University of Missouri to Yale University to Claremont McKenna College in California and beyond, students of minority groups which were only relatively recently permitted access to higher education are protesting the unacceptable ways they're treated in their ‘elite’ communities. 

But while protests against racism on campus are perhaps the loudest — or at least the most visible — there's another damaging force against which students are pushing back: classism.

Low-income students' concerns often intersect with issues of race: Almost two-thirds of African-American undergraduate students and 51% of Latino undergraduate students receive Pell Grants, or federal funds allocated to low-income students, according to the Washington Post. But confrontations over class-based issues on campus often emerge in ways that are different than debates over race. While many low-income students certainly encounter blatantly classist attitudes, their socio-economic backgrounds frequently disadvantage them in more subtle — though equally detrimental — ways.

Is higher education really an equalizing force? For centuries, ‘college was reserved for elite, mostly white men,’ Anne Phillips, executive director of Class Action, an organization that seeks to end classism, told Mic.“