"Not all stereotypes are negative. But even a positive one like 'All Asians are good at math' is harmful to society."
—Tour guide for the Museum of Tolerance, "The Death Camp of Tolerance" episode of South Park
I imagine it must have been some kind of affirmative-action-style policy introduced early on, maybe during the Stalinist era, or maybe, if it originates in the USSR, even earlier. Kids from worker class have been truly disadvantaged in many obvious ways, so giving them preferential access to the college education would only be fair.
Anyway, there was a problem with the approach. If a member of politburo had a kid, guess what? Kid's dad was an administrator and thus the kid wasn't from a worker family. And the same thing applied to every single person in position of power. Apparatchiks would have been dumb if they hadn't found a loophole.
Enter "working intelligentsia". You see, you dad may be a big boss in the party and your mom a ballerina, but your parents were "working intelligentsia" and so it was all right to classify you as coming from a worker family.
This hack renders the entire mechanism ineffective. If everybody comes from a worker family nobody has to be treated preferentially.
If you were naive, you would say that that's the end of the story. But not so fast!
No instrument of power is ever left unused.
In this case, it became a powerful weapon against dissent. If your dad was a renegade professor who got demoted (as the stereotype goes) to a boilerman, he was not a worker. He was a parasite of the people, forced to do manual work to teach him better ways. And no, his kids would not be classified as being from a worker family.
