Anthony Abraham Jack is an Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the diverse experiences of first-generation, low-income students at elite universities. His book The Privileged Poor examined the contrasting experiences of low-income students that graduated from affluent feeder high schools, and the doubly disadvantaged, low-income students coming from underfunded, troubled high schools. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The National Review, and numerous other publications. He is currently a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and holds the Shutzer Assistant Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
This interview was conducted by Coby Garcia, transcribed by Laila Nasher, and edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: What personal experiences in your life have led you to research the problem that selective colleges face when admitting students from diverse economic backgrounds?
Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack: I entered Amherst College after it adopted its no-loan financial aid policy. At that time, Amherst was one and a half times my mother’s annual salary. A lot of [the college experience] was getting used to being around so many wealthy Black and Latino students. I didn’t think anything about it. It wasn’t until I worked for the admissions office; I was a diversity intern at Amherst College. I kept hearing programs like Prep For Prep, Cranbrook, Upward Bound, Teak, and all these different kinds of programs. And we just bring in a whole bunch of low-income students of color who went to prep schools.
When I got to graduate school, I realized that no one was writing about the fact that so many students of color, who are low income, come from boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. When I discovered that they assume certain things about their lower-income students: they assume that we knew what office hours are, they assume that we had an understanding of many things that make up the hidden curriculum. I said: this is wrong.
And so that’s what inspired my approach to sociology, not only to expand our theoretical understanding of a very important social problem but also inform our very practical underground solutions to address and ameliorate some of the inequalities that have been plaguing students for generations.
HPR: Can you identify a clear commonality among those who you determined to be the privileged poor?
Jack: Their ease of privilege and how it exhibits in certain ways, or rather their familiarity with the ease of privilege. They know how to interact with wealth and whiteness in a way that their lower-income peers do not. So whether it means venturing to people’s second homes, Hermes bracelets, birthdays, or something more practical as going to office hours to explore an internship. They were more familiar and even comfortable with those things than the lower-income peers who did not go to prep schools.
HPR: What are the defining features of low-income high schools that the dubious disadvantaged attend?
Jack: You are subjectively low income in the sense that compared to your peers, the university is saying that you have not hit a threshold of certain class status. But it’s also objective in the sense that most of the students who I interview come from households that make less than $40,000 a year.
When I mean by the poor, troubled, or underfunded school, the commonalities are more of what you will see as the consequences of concentrated poverty such as over overcrowded schools and lack of resources. As one student told me, her four years before college were filled with peers fighting, setting trash cans on fire, and skipping school. It’s a consequence of poor neighborhoods growing poorer by lack of investment, the outsourcing of jobs, the kind of things that William Julius Wilson talks about in The Truly Disadvantaged. We’re talking about high levels of segregated ratio, and socio-economic segregation that leads us to have a desperately unequal and depressingly stratified secondary school experience for lower-income students.
HPR: You stated in an interview with the Center of Ethics and Education that 50% of poor black students and 33% of four Latinx students at selective colleges are boarding or preparatory high schools. Were you surprised by that statistic?
Jack: No, I wasn’t surprised by the statistics. I was shocked that so many people did not know about this basic on-ramp to elite colleges that prep schools provide. Here’s the problem: Everybody has such a stereotypical image of what it means to be poor and black or poor and brown. That they are so quick to tell the story of isolation, culture shock, difference, that they ignore this well-funded, well-established system of plucking and placing the best and the brightest poor students into private schools. So Harvard and Yale can pat themselves on the back saying, we have the most first gens, but where are you getting your first gens from?
HPR: How did you come to your conclusions about specific groups of students and their experiences, especially the experiences of the privileged poor? Could you explain how you avoided making generalizations about groups of students?
Jack: I’m a sociologist. You have to listen to the data; There is a general pattern that I observed among individuals who had similar sets of circumstances that were previously ignored. That’s scientific inquiry, that’s the power of research is to teach us something new about the world that can be tested. The theory is a formulation of the world that can be empirically tested.
As a first-generation college student, and I draw on W.E.B DuBois here, I hold myself to a higher standard of writing about the population, because not only am I a member, but I care about that community. So I had to make sure that not only am I giving you the narratives, I gave you the numbers and statistics about what different their neighborhood and community were. I grounded it in the narratives of the students who opened their hearts to me.
HPR: There are many programs, such as Questbridge, that offer full rides to low-income students, many of whom come from public schools. Many criticize these types of programs, suggesting that they cause low-income students to have to compete with other low-income students. What do you think about these programs?
Jack: I think that’s the wrong way to think about them because Questbridge is more about guarantee placement, once you go through their system than anything else. It’s almost like saying that the Coca-Cola scholarship or the Gates scholarship is somehow bad because you’re competing against other people. Well, that’s kind of the point of applying for anything competitive, you’re applying against everybody else.
To me, that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. My biggest thing about full-ride programs is if it only stops at a full ride. What happens the day after convocation? What happens when you move in and your roommate has a building named after her? What happens when you’re on campus during spring break and everything’s closed? Full-ride scholarships are about the financial burden, not the social one. The biggest worry is when we think that a full ride is enough. I want us to move beyond the belief that a full ride is enough.
