If you get a paycheck and are not an owner you are a worker.  Workers do not own the means of production and are paid for their time by those who do.  Scientists never have free reign to do as they please.  To be paid they must do what their employer wants.  Scientists are workers who are paid for their time.

Definition:

Correct:  The class of industrial wage earners who, possessing neither capital nor production means, must earn their living by selling their labor.

Incorrect: The poorest class of working people.  This definition is actual capitalist propaganda intended to confabulate some some highly paid workers with a middle class.  The middle class is an entirely different class.  The middle class are small business owners who are not paid by other people and who in fact may employ a few people.  The middle class is petite-bourgeois.

Education does not move people out of the working class.  The working class does not own or have any say in the means of production.  They are paid by those who do.  How much they are paid does not change the arrangement.

'The poorest class of working people.'  Is an oxymoron.  In capitalism the poorest class in society are always those who do actual work as everyone knows, and learned during COVID.  Can we all say 'ESSENTIAL WORKER' together.  Every Marxist knows capitalism only pays workers enough to survive.  In capitalism the working class is by definition poor.  That is why 'poorest class of workers' is nonsense. 

Capitalism bakes poor workers into the cake.  It is a notable contradiction of capitalism that regardless of the quantity of goods produced there are always people in need.  For capitalism to work there must always be people who are unemployed and willing to work for a low wage.  Capitalism needs a reserve army of labor to function.  This reserve army is the unemployed.  People in need, suffering and ready for exploitation.  If capitalism did not have unemployed people it would make them.

The market is so wise that it requires people suffer to function.