Public Writing
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2021. “Doing More With Less.” The New York Times, August 15.
“The Blacker the college, the sweeter the knowledge,” the old saying goes. And with the recent appointments of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates at Howard University, one may hear it with renewed vigor. When looking at the history of Black colleges, however, one can extend the maxim to include “the harder fought the battle.” From their inception, colleges established to educate the descendants of enslaved people have been given less and expected to do more. Highlighting the lives of those whose names line pages of case law, “The State Must Provide,” by Adam Harris, shows how the legacy of racism and exclusion shapes higher education today.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2020. “A Separate and Unequal System of College Admissions.” The New York Times, September 15.
Money talks and privilege walks. In the case of college admissions, it saunters through wrought-iron gates, past signs emblazoned with “Welcome Class of” and into seats at convocation. Timely and engaging, “Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions,” by Jeffrey Selingo, and “Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal,” by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, detail how college admissions is rigged in favor of the privileged and how it came to be gamed even further.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2018. “It’s Hard to Be Hungry on Spring Break.” The New York Times, March 17.
The phrase “spring break” conjures up images of college students lounging on beaches by day and hitting the clubs at night. Many students do, in fact, travel from campus to far-flung places. On the assumption that most students leave, schools generally shut down. But this assumption is outdated, especially as colleges enroll a greater number of academically talented students from poor families.
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2015. “What the Privileged Poor Can Teach Us.” The New York Times, September 13.
While elite colleges have taken strides in financially supporting students previously left outside their gates, they have thought less about what that inclusion means for academic life, or how colleges themselves might need to change to help the least advantaged continue on their road to success.
Academic Writing
Belonging and Boundaries at an Elite University
Scholars posit that lower-income undergraduates experience “cultural mismatch,” which undermines their sense of belonging, promotes withdrawal from campus, and limits mobility upon graduation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 103 undergraduates at an elite university, we examine how students’ diverse trajectories to college affect how they identify as members of the community and modulate the relationship between social class and sense of belonging. While upper-income undergraduates find commonalities between themselves and college peers and integrate into the community, lower-income students offer divergent accounts. The doubly disadvantaged—lower-income undergraduates who attended local, typically distressed public high schools—felt a heightened sense of difference, drew moral boundaries, and withdrew from campus life. Alternatively, the privileged poor—lower-income undergraduates who attended boarding, day, and preparatory high schools—adopted a cosmopolitan approach focused on continued expansion of horizons and integrated into campus. Through detailing this overlooked diversity among lower-income undergraduates, our findings expand theoretical frameworks for examining sense of belonging to include boundary work that shapes students’ agendas, thereby deepening our understanding of the reproduction of inequality in college.
Winner of the 2023 Outstanding Article Award, Poverty, Class, and Inequality Division, Society for the Study of Social Problems
William Julius Wilson and the Study of the ‘New’ Diversity at Elite Colleges.
I use this opportunity to reflect on the intellectual and theoretical foundations of my research agenda. This essay also pays tribute to my mentor and advisor William Julius Wilson, whose influence on sociological theory and public policy shapes my own thinking about the relationship between education and inequality.
How do undergraduates engage authority figures in college? Existing explanations predict class-based engagement strategies. Employing in-depth interviews with 89 undergraduates at an elite university, I show how undergraduates with disparate precollege experiences differ in their orientations toward and strategies for engaging authority figures in college. Middle-class undergraduates report being at ease in interacting with authority figures and are proactive in doing so. Undergraduates from lower-income backgrounds, however, are split. The Privileged Poor—lower-income undergraduates who attend boarding, day, and preparatory high schools—enter college with dominant forms of cultural capital akin to those of their middle-class peers, are primed to engage professors, and are proactive in doing so. By contrast, the Doubly Disadvantaged—lower-income undergraduates who remain tied to their home communities and typically distressed schools before college enter college with less cultural capital, are more defensive when engaging authority figures in college, and tend to withdraw from them. Through documenting the heterogeneity between lower-income undergraduates, I show how static understandings of individuals’ cultural endowments derived singularly from family background homogenize the experiences of lower-income undergraduates. In so doing, I shed new light on the cultural underpinnings of education processes in higher education.
Lead Article
Winner of the 2015 Graduate Student Paper Award, Educational Problems Division, Society for the Study of Social Problems
Top Ten Downloaded Article of 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022
Featured in The Atlantic, The National Review, The New York Times, NPR
Scholars argue that lower-income undergraduates’ transition from segregated, distressed communities to college fosters heightened senses of difference and alienation in college. I call undergraduates socialized and educated in these contexts the Doubly Disadvantaged. Extant research, however, overlooks undergraduates who participate in pipeline initiatives that place lower-income students in elite boarding, day, and preparatory schools, permitting them greater exposure to wealth, whites, and privilege. I call undergraduates who travel this alternative route the Privileged Poor. This chapter investigates how differences in the Doubly Disadvantaged and Privileged Poor’s precollege experiences influence their experiences with class marginality and culture shock in college.
Culture Shock Revisited: The Social and Cultural Contingencies to Class Marginality
Existing explanations of class marginality predict similar social experiences for all lower-income undergraduates. This paper extends this literature by presenting data highlighting the cultural and social contingencies that account for differences in experiences of class marginality. The degree of cultural and social dissimilarity between one’s life before and during college helps explain variation in experiences. I contrast the experiences of two groups of lower-income, black undergraduates—the Doubly Disadvantaged and Privileged Poor. Although from comparable disadvantaged households and neighborhoods, they travel along divergent paths to college. Unlike the Doubly Disadvantaged, whose precollege experiences are localized, the Privileged Poor cross social boundaries for school. In college, the Doubly Disadvantaged report negative interactions with peers and professors and adopt isolationist strategies, while the Privileged Poor generally report positive interactions and adopt integrationist strategies. In addition to extending present conceptualizations of class marginality, this study advances our understanding of how and when class and culture matter in stratification processes in college.
What We Face: Framing Problems in the Black Community
While many sociological studies analyze the causes, conditions, and mechanisms perpetuating American racial inequality, the literature on how African Americans understand and explain these inequalities is less developed. Drawing on 150 interviews with middle-class and working-class African American men and women, this paper analyzes inductively how respondents define and conceptualize the most pressing obstacles facing their group when probed on this question. We find that middle- and working-class respondents alike identify the problem of racism as the most salient obstacle facing African Americans. Class differences appear with respect to what other obstacles are singled out as salient: while middle-class respondents focus on lack of racial solidarity among Blacks and economic problems (in this order), working-class respondents are more concerned with the fragility of the Black family followed by the lack of racial solidarity. This analysis discusses the relevance of considering how groups make sense of obstacles, and of racism and discrimination in particular, for the study of destigmatization and antiracist strategies of stigmatized minorities.