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.
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.
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. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students is his first book. His second book project, When Campus Closed: How Elite Colleges Are Still Failing Disadvantaged Students, is due out in 2024.
Recent News
In the Media
- A First-Generation Tale of Strife and Success
- The Newest Benefit at Top Companies: Private College Admissions Counseling
- From Athletes to Clarinetists: Who Gets Preferential Treatment in Top College Admissions?
- Legacy Admissions Don’t Work the Way You Think They Do
- Sociologist and Scholar Anthony Abraham Jack’s Mission: Create a More Welcoming Campus
Education
PhD, Sociology, Harvard University
AM, Sociology, Harvard University
BA, Women’s and Gender Studies & Religion, Amherst College
Selected Publications
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. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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.