The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students

Sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack is currently a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and also serves as an assistant professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In addition to The Privileged Poor, he has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and several academic journals. His research has also been featured in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, Politico, and other publications. Most of his research focuses on the relative diversity of lower-income college students.

Jack spent his teenage years in Coconut Grove, a low-income neighborhood in Miami. His mother worked as a security guard at a local middle school, and his older brother cleaned classrooms by day and emergency rooms at night. As a high school senior, Jack transferred to Gulliver, an elite day school. Jack received a BA from Amherst College, majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies as well as Religion; he completed his PhD in Sociology at Harvard. Being a Black man who grew up disadvantaged, and then becoming equally familiar with the ways and mores of elite academic institutions such as Harvard, gives Jack insight into a variety of perspectives.

From 2013 to 2016, Jack embedded at the elite university he pseudonymously calls Renowned.