One thing that shouldn’t be ignored is the effect of critical mass. A few weeks ago, there was an essay in the NY Times by a Hispanic woman – now a college professor – about her utter sense of confusion and incomprehension in her first month of college at Cornell. She owes her career, in large part, to a kind instructor who figured out she had no idea what she was doing and who gently guided her to various support resources she had no idea existed. If you have a lot of low SES students going through the process all the time, they can support one another, useful folklore develops and gets passed around, and professors, TAs, and deans get experience with strategies that work to overcome the academic and social difficulties that torpedo lots of low income students in college. Practice might never make perfect, but it probably makes better.