Anthony Abraham Jack
Faculty Director, Newbury Center
Professor
Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack is the inaugural faculty director of the Newbury Center and professor of higher education leadership at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. 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 Educational Studies Association, American Sociological Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Society of Professors of Education.
Dr. Jack held fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation and was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow. 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 and the National Head Start Association named him a BOLD Alumni Leader for his work in transforming higher education.
The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Nation, American Conservative Magazine, the National Review, Teen Vouge, the Washington Post, Vice, Vox, and NPR have featured Dr. Jack’s research and writing as well as biographical profiles of his experiences as a first-generation college student.
Dr. Jack’s first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, was awarded the 2020 Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, the 2019 CEP Mildred Garcia Award for Exemplary Scholarship, and the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize and was also named a finalist for the 2019 C. Wright Mills Award and a NPR Book’s Best Book of 2019. His second book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price, received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews; was named a finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Education from Foreword Reviews; was longlisted for the 2025 Massachusetts Book of the Year by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; and was awarded the 2025 PROSE Award for Education Theory and Practice by the Association of American Publishers, the 2025 Critics’ Choice Book Award by the American Educational Studies Association, a 2026 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, and a Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award.
Recent News
- BU Wheelock Faculty Promoted to Full Professor
- Scholarly Accomplishments, April 2026
- Scholarly Accomplishments, February 2026
- Four Faculty Rated Top Educational Policy Influencers
- Scholarly Accomplishments, November 2025
- Scholarly Accomplishments, September 2025
- Scholarly Accomplishments May 2025
- Scholarly Accomplishments April 2025
- Three BU Wheelock Faculty Named Top Educational Policy Influencers
- New Year, New Potential
In the Media
- First-Gen Graduates Celebration
- Three Educators Find Their Common Roots in Head Start
- MIT Requires Every Student to Know How to Swim. But Why?
- Dr. Anthony Jack to Deliver 2026 Pennington Lecture at the Wadsworth
- Want to Get Into a Great College? Try Being Rich, Male, and a Champion Squash Player.
- More 4-year colleges offer 2-year degrees to reach new groups of students
- How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery
- Programming for First-Gen Students of All Degree Paths
- How Trump’s Executive Order Could Reshape College Admissions and Campus Diversity across the US
- Trump Escalates a Fight Over How to Measure Merit in American Education
Education
PhD, Sociology, Harvard University
AM, Sociology, Harvard University
BA, Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion, Amherst College
Selected Publications
Books
Jack, A. A. (2019). The privileged poor: How elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students. Harvard University Press.
Jack, A. A. (2024). Class dismissed: When colleges ignore inequality and students pay the price. Princeton University Press.
Articles and Chapters
Churchill, M., Curenton, S., & Jack, A. A. (2025, October 31). Three paths: One foundation. Three educators find their common roots in Head Start. National Head Start Association. https://nhsa.org/resource/three-paths-one-foundation/
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.