Photo Credit: Chris D’Amore
Anthony Abraham Jack (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2016) is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University.
His research documents the overlooked diversity among lower-income undergraduates: the Doubly Disadvantaged—those who enter college from local, typically distressed public high schools—and Privileged Poor—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. Tony 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 May 2020, Muhlenberg College awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work in transforming higher education.
The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Teen Vogue, The Huffington Post, The Nation, American Conservative Magazine, The National Review, Commentary Magazine, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Times Higher Education, 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 (2019) 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. It is available in English and Chinese. His second book, Class Dismissed: When College Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price (2024), 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, and earned the 2025 PROSE Award for Education Theory and Practice by the Association of American Publishers.