Hagan Center Events

“When you address the inequalities that disproportionately fall on the shoulders of first-generation and low-income college students, you make the university better for all students,” says Anthony Jack. A powerful speaker on belonging, he’s transforming the way we address inclusion in education. He’s an associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University, and faculty director of BU’s Newbury Center, where he works to increase understanding and equity around first-generation students on campus.

His widely acclaimed book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students, reframes the conversation surrounding poverty and higher education. In it, he explains the paths of two uniquely segregated groups. First, the “privileged poor”: students from low-income, marginalized backgrounds who attended elite prep or boarding school before attending college. The second are what Anthony calls the “doubly disadvantaged”—students who arrive from underprivileged backgrounds without prep or boarding school to soften their college transition. Although both groups come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the privileged poor have more cultural capital to navigate and succeed—in the college environment and beyond.

“The lasting beauty of Jack’s ethnography is that it gives a voice to the students who, as his research ends up revealing, most need it.”

—The New Yorker

“It’s one thing to graduate with a degree from an elite institution, and another thing to graduate with the social capital to activate that degree,” Anthony explains. In many ways, rather than close the wealth gap, campus culture at elite schools further alienates poor students by making them feel like they don’t belong. To challenge these deeply ingrained social, cultural, and economic disparities on campus, we must first begin to question what we take for granted. Anthony reveals how organizations—from administrators and association organizers, to educators and student activists—can ask the right questions and bridge the gap.

In addition to The Privileged Poor, Anthony is the author of Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price. He explores why colleges were so unprepared to support their most vulnerable students when racial unrest and a global health crisis gripped the world, and more importantly, how we can move forward. He offers practical frameworks that colleges and workplaces alike can use to foster belonging, success, and opportunity for all students and employees. Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, calls Class Dismissed “exemplary.” In a starred review, Kirkus calls it “sobering, well supported, and trenchantly reported. A compulsively readable, powerfully argued book.” It has also received high praise from The National Review, The American Conservative Magazine, and Commentary Magazine, as well as Science, Harvard Magazine, and more.

Anthony’s research has been cited by The New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The National Review, The Washington Post, American RadioWorks, WBUR, and MPR. His book, The Privileged Poor, was named the 2018 recipient of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize by Harvard University Press.

The presentation below "On Diversity: Access Ain’t Inclusion" by Anthony Jack was recorded at TEDxCambridge in 2019.