Erin Waddles was a master’s student in the University of Pennsylvania’s Higher Education Division. To enhance her experience, she worked as a graduate intern at the Greenfield Intercultural Center, where she supported all of the programming and training at this center. Her professional interests center on promoting equity, access, and diversity in higher education.
By increasing the number of first-generation, low-income, and/or underrepresented students that enter and complete higher education, both the student AND the economy will be helped, they say. But in this rhetoric, this endeavor to push more first-generation, low-income and/or underrepresented minorities into attaining postsecondary education, we are again putting the burden of solving the nation’s economic problems on those who are already marginalized.