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Description: Education is not equally distributed across all people. The “achievement gap” describes the phenomenon that students from a low social class background have lower access to academia and less academic success compared to their peers. The current research investigates how social class background affects feelings of identity incompatibility and, in turn, the development of a social identity as a student. It is predicted that incompatibility mediates the effect of social class background on social identification (a positive internalized relation to the group) and, more so, on disidentification (a negative internalized relation to the group) with students. Moreover, it is predicted that disidentification reduces academic performance and increases university dropout rates. Two longitudinal datasets support the predictions. The current research demonstrates that students with low social class background suffer from identity-related adaptation problems that affect their academic trajectories.