Privileged Poor

An NPR Favorite Book of the YearWinner of the Critics’ Choice Book Award, American Educational Studies AssociationWinner of the Mirra Komarovsky Book AwardWinner of the CEP–Mildred García Award for Exemplary ScholarshipWinner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial PrizeGetting in is only half the battle. The Privileged Poor reveals how—and why—disadvantaged students struggle at elite colleges, and explains what schools can do differently if these students are to thrive.The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In The Privileged Poor, Anthony Jack reveals that the struggles of less privileged students continue long after they’ve arrived on campus. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This bracing and necessary book documents how university policies and cultures can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why these policies hit some students harder than others.Despite their lofty aspirations, top colleges hedge their bets by recruiting their new diversity largely from the same old sources, admitting scores of lower-income black, Latino, and white undergraduates from elite private high schools like Exeter and Andover. These students approach campus life very differently from students who attended local, and typically troubled, public high schools and are often left to flounder on their own. Drawing on interviews with dozens of undergraduates at one of America’s most famous colleges and on his own experiences as one of the privileged poor, Jack describes the lives poor students bring with them and shows how powerfully background affects their chances of success.If we truly want our top colleges to be engines of opportunity, university policies and campus cultures will have to change. Jack provides concrete advice to help schools reduce these hidden disadvantages—advice we cannot afford to ignore.

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., 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., [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.’, 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., [An] examination of the way elite colleges and universities welcome, and don’t welcome, students from the working classes.

Anthony Abraham Jack is Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and his research has been featured on The Open Mind, All Things Considered, and CNN. The Privileged Poor was named an NPR Books Best Book of 2019.