Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to
the matter of inclusion. Rather than parse the spurious meritocracy of admissions,
his book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in
advertising.
-- New Yorker
What Jack
discovered challenges us to think carefully about the campus lives of poor students
and the responsibility elite institutions have for not only their education but also
their social and economic mobility…The Privileged Poor breaks new
ground on social and educational questions of great import.
-- Washington
Post
[An] eye-opening exposure of what it’s like to
be poor on elite college campuses…Jack’s book brings home the pain and reality of
on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions for fostering
policies that often ‘emphasize class differences, amplifying students’ feelings of
difference and undercutting their sense of belonging.’
-- Washington
Post
A sobering reminder that, despite considerable
efforts in recent years to increase the intake of talented young adults from
disadvantaged backgrounds into leading universities and colleges, much more needs to
be done to prepare and support them during their studies if they are to
thrive.
-- Andrew Jack Financial Times
[An]
examination of the way elite colleges and universities welcome, and don’t welcome,
students from the working classes.
-- Edwin Aponte The
Nation
Navigating college is hard for many young
people, and for low-income students or kids whose parents didn’t go to college, it
can be even trickier…So many professors have told me this book made them rethink
their own classrooms.
-- Elissa Nadworny NPR
Books
The lesson is plain—simply admitting
low-income students is just the start of a university’s obligations. Once they’re on
campus, colleges must show them that they are full-fledged citizen.
--
David Kirp American Prospect
Jack wants people to
see beyond his personal success to his research findings: Elite colleges not only
fail to admit enough low-income students; they also fail to care for the ones they
let in.
-- Chris Quintana Chronicle of Higher
Education
This book’s central message is as plain as
it is substantial: access is not the same as inclusion. Increasing the number of
low-income students in higher education is only the start of a university’s
obligations…As a skillful interviewer and insightful observer, Jack reveals
deep-seated class disparities that manifest themselves not just in the clothes
students wear and the holidays they take, but in what they expect of their
professors and envisage for themselves while in university and beyond. In so doing,
Jack opens up new ground to interrogate the ‘long shadow’ of class inequality
throughout the educational system. For all these reasons, this book is a
considerable achievement.
-- Malik Fercovic LSE Review of
Books
[A] remarkable book…I believe every
administrator, faculty and student in college should read this to understand some
obstacles students encounter in college that often go unnoticed.
-- Andrew
Martinez Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
Jack
demonstrates…simply admitting low-income students to elite universities does not, by
itself, produce equal outcomes. Too often, university policies, institutional
cultures and norms, and even campus jobs exacerbate pre-existing inequalities, widen
class differences, reinforce feelings of difference and undercut a sense of
belonging.
-- Steven Mintz Inside Higher
Ed
In a word, brilliant. Jack uncovers the myriad
ways in which poverty handicaps even the most talented youth as they navigate
college. Not stopping there, Jack carefully details how universities are no mere
bystanders; he lays bare how they preach openness as they practice exclusion.
The Privileged Poor is a provocative, eye-opening account of what
it means to be poor on a college campus and is essential reading for all who are
concerned about the future of our children.
-- Reshma Saujani, founder and
CEO of Girls Who Code
The Privileged
Poor is so essential. Our higher ed community very much needs a shared
language and a set of research-based recommendations when it comes to designing and
running institutional efforts and initiatives intended to level the postsecondary
playing field.
-- Joshua Kim Inside Higher
Ed
For years, elite colleges have claimed to be the
saviors of low-income students. With careful research Anthony Jack pulls back the
curtain and reveals the real college experiences of these students on an Ivy-covered
campus. Best of all, he demands that we do something about it.
-- Sara
Goldrick-Rab, Founding Director of the Hope Center for College, Community, and
Justice
Professor Anthony Jack illustrates the
multidimensional nature of poverty and privilege by providing a window into the
nuanced experiences of low-income, first-generation college students at elite
institutions. Professor Jack’s keen analysis and clear argument helps all of
us—students, teachers, administrators, and system leaders—to identify and fill the
cracks through which many students can fall. This important book will help us ensure
even greater access, equity, and success in college for the vast array of talented
students in our great American mosaic.
-- Daniel R. Porterfield, CEO, The
Aspen Institute
The Privileged
Poor is three books in one: an engrossing personal memoir, a collection of
rigorous scholarship, and a powerful manifesto for a new movement to improve the
lives of low-income students at elite universities. It’s an essential work, humane
and candid, that challenges and expands our understanding of the lives of
contemporary college students.
-- Paul Tough, author of Helping
Children Succeed: What Works and
Why
Anthony Jack’s beautifully written
book provides a riveting account of the experiences at elite campuses of students
from low-income families. He shows how badly many elite schools understand the
experiences of students from poor backgrounds and how these failures of
understanding undermine efforts to expand access. The book is a must-read for anyone
who hopes to help colleges and universities meet their aspirations to be engines of
mobility.
-- Danielle Allen, author of Cuz: The Life and Times of
Michael A.
In this insightful study,
Anthony Abraham Jack examines how disparate precollege experiences affect the
cultural and social resources economically disadvantaged students bring to elite
colleges, and how they use these resources in navigating life on campus. The
Privileged Poor is an eye opener even for a professor like me who has taught courses
on inequality at elite universities for nearly a half century. It is, in short, a
tour de force that will be read, discussed, and debated for decades.
--
William Julius Wilson, author of More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor
in the Inner City
Through meticulous
interviews and rich personal narratives, Jack brilliantly brings alive the
experiences of low-income college students at elite colleges and uncovers an
important group—the ‘privileged poor’—who have frequently been overlooked in prior
work. This book should be studied closely by anyone interested in improving
diversity and inclusion in higher education and provides a moving call to action for
us all.
-- Raj Chetty, Harvard
University
Jack’s well-researched study is matched
by his advocacy for adding programs that could help bring these students closer to
the already privileged.
-- Improper
Bostonian
A book about social class in American
higher education and the often painful culture clashes it gives rise to.
--
Matthew Reisz Times Higher Education
What Jack
contributes to the recent spate of books on college is not only the inside access to
what we might reasonably presume to be America’s oldest and most prestigious
university, but the illumination of a distinct group of students within this elite
institution.
-- Mitchell L. Stevens Public
Books
Jack looks under the hood, recounting the
myriad ways that low-income students, who are overwhelmingly students of color,
experienced the relationships and resources—or lack thereof—at an elite
university…Colleges fail to understand and effectively step in to support low-income
students in general, and the doubly disadvantaged in particular.
-- Julia
Freeland Fisher The 74
A compelling and valuable
read.
-- Elizabeth M. Lee American Journal of
Sociology
Serves as a long-awaited wake-up call for
the educational equity policy of American universities.
-- Xueli Huang
Social Justice Research
