Anthony Abraham Jack
Faculty Director, Newbury Center
Associate Professor
Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack is the inaugural faculty director of the Newbury Center and associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.
Dr. Jack’s research documents the overlooked diversity among lower-income undergraduates: the “doubly disadvantaged”—those who enter college from local, typically distressed public high schools—and the “privileged poor,” or those who do so from boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. His scholarship appears in the Common Reader, Du Bois Review, Social Problems, Sociological Forum, and Sociology of Education and has earned awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Dr. Jack held fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation and was a 2015 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow. In 2016, the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan named him an Emerging Diversity Scholar. In 2020, Muhlenberg College awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work in transforming higher education.
Dr. Jack is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students and Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price. The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffington Post, the Nation, American Conservative Magazine, National Review, the Washington Post, Vice, Vox, and NPR have featured his research and writing as well as biographical profiles of his experiences as a first-generation college student.
Recent News
- Scholarly Accomplishments May 2025
- Scholarly Accomplishments April 2025
- Three BU Wheelock Faculty Named Top Educational Policy Influencers
- New Year, New Potential
- Three Faculty Rated Top Educational Policy Influencers
- How Higher Education Can Support First-Gen Students
- A More Welcoming Campus
- Exploring Equity in Selective College Admissions
- BU Wheelock Welcomes New Faculty for 2023
In the Media
- With Black Enrollment Down, Amherst College Faces an Identity Crisis
- How BU Became a National Model and Destination for First-Generation Students
- Campus DEI Programs Under Fire After Supreme Court Ruling on Race
- Harvard Haves and Have-Nots
- Is Higher Education Ignoring Inequality and Failing Disadvantaged Students?
- BU Professor Explores Inequality on College Campuses in New Book about Harvard
- Elite Colleges Are More Diverse Than Ever. They’re Still Unequal.
- Class Dismissed, New Book by Anthony Jack, Explores Challenges for Low-Income Students
- Class Dismissed: Q&A with Anthony Abraham Jack
- ‘Class Dismissed’ Explores How Universities Fail Students of Color
Education
PhD, Sociology, Harvard University
AM, Sociology, Harvard University
BA, Women’s and Gender Studies & Religion, Amherst College
Selected Publications
Books
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2024. Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2019. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Articles and Chapters
Roscigno, Vincent J., Elizabeth Lee, Allison Hurst, David Brady, Anthony Abraham Jack, Colby King, Kevin Delaney, Monica McDermott, José A. Muñoz, Wendi Johnson, Robert Francis, Deborah Warnock, and Margaret Vitullo. 2023. “Mobility & Inequality in the Professoriate: How and Why First-Generation and Working-Class Backgrounds Matter.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.
Jack, Anthony Abraham and Zennon Black. 2022. “Belonging and Boundaries at an Elite University.” Social Problems.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2019. “On Her Behalf: James Baldwin, Family, and Educational Inequality.” Common Reader. 4(1):19-38
Jack, Anthony Abraham and Veronique Irwin. 2018. “Seeking Out Support: Variation in Academic Engagement Strategies among Black Undergraduates at an Elite College.” P. 135 – 160 in Clearing the Path for First-Generation College Students: Qualitative and Intersectional Studies of Educational Mobility, edited by A. C. Rondini, B. Richards-Dowden, and N. P. Simon. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2018. “William Julius Wilson and the Study of the ‘New’ Diversity at Elite Colleges.” P. 173 – 182 in The New Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by M. A. Hunter. New York, NY: Routledge.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2016. “(No) Harm in Asking: Class, Acquired Cultural Capital, and Academic Engagement at an Elite University.” Sociology of Education 89(1):1-19.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2015. “Crisscrossing Boundaries: Variation in Experiences with Class Marginality among Lower-Income, Black Undergraduates at an Elite College.” Pg. 83-101 in College Students’ Experiences of Power and Marginality: Sharing Spaces and Negotiating Differences, edited by E. L. and C. LaDousa. Routledge.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2014. “Culture Shock Revisited: The Social and Cultural Contingencies to Class Marginality.” Sociological Forum 29(2):453-475.
Hirsch, Nicole Arlette* and Anthony Abraham Jack. 2012. “What We Face: Framing Problems in the Black Community.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 9(1):133–48.