Can This Man Change How Elite Colleges Treat Low-Income Students?

Some days, it still doesn’t feel real. Last week, Anthony Abraham Jack was at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to celebrate the release of a new book — his own, published by Harvard University Press. It’s a case study of how elite institutions like the one where he teaches, Harvard, fail low-income students. The subject matter is intimately familiar to him.

Jack is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education and at 6-foot-5 is unmistakable in its narrow hallways. He knits as he talks in his office in Cambridge, the place he has called home now for the past decade. The biting cold, the historic buildings, and the old money are almost a perfect foil to Jack’s upbringing in the sweltering heat of Miami. At Harvard, he’s surrounded by people whose family backgrounds, attendance at elite prep schools, college tutors, and social networks led them to this paragon of American higher education. Many of their parents passed through a similar set of doors. Jack was a first-generation college student. His mother is a security guard. His brother works as a janitor at a Miami elementary school. Jack attended underresourced public schools for most of his primary education.

He played high-school football for one of those schools, but a blown shoulder benched him. That led to an argument with his coach, so Jack sought out something better, and wound up with a full scholarship at a Florida private school called Gulliver. It was only a year, but Jack says it was enough to acquaint him with the ways of the wealthy, their $1,000 coats, their vacations that cost more than his family made in a year. More importantly, he says, it taught him how to seize the academic advantages offered to those students.

That led him to Amherst College, which led to graduate school at Harvard, which led to the deal for his book, The Privileged Poor. On the wall behind him hang his framed graduate degrees and an op-ed, also framed, that he wrote for The New York Times about poor students at elite colleges.

It’s easy to focus solely on where Jack started and how high he has ascended. It’s an inspiring story that gives him an almost unassailable authority to write and do research about the experiences of poor students. But his narrative also presents a challenge to his work, by suggesting that all low-income students who make it to elite colleges thrive. Many do not. Jack wants people to see beyond his personal success to his research findings: Elite colleges not only fail to admit enough low-income students; they also fail to care for the ones they let in.

“It’s one thing to graduate with a degree from an elite institution and another thing to graduate with the social capital to activate that degree,” Jack says. In fact, in many cases, elite colleges widen rather than narrow the gulf between the wealthy and the poor, he argues, by making low-income students feel like outsiders who don’t actually belong on campus.

His research comes at a time when these institutions are trying to increase the percentage of students from impoverished backgrounds, through need-blind applications, greater outreach, and scholarship programs. As Jack notes in his book, “Changes in financial aid have ushered in significant demographic shifts, bringing the rich and the poor together in ways that are happening nowhere else in this country.” His findings suggest entrenched class distinctions that manifest themselves not just in the clothes students wear and the vacations they take, but in what they understand about college, expect of their professors, and imagine for themselves.

In Cambridge, it feels like everyone is wearing one of those Canada Goose jackets. It’s cold in New England — some Arctic researchers turn to this type of coat to handle subzero temperatures — and the logo, a red circle with an outline of Antarctica, is instantly recognizable. Where some people see a coat that’s a little bit of overkill, Jack sees inequality.

At a shop in Cambridge that sells the jackets, Jack finds none below $650. When people tell Jack his coat looks like Canada Goose, he has to laugh. They’re not in his price range, and besides, they don’t come in his size.

Many of the low-income students Jack interviewed for his research questioned the sanity of anyone spending so much on a coat. (All the students quoted in the book go by pseudonyms. Jack calls their institution Renowned University, “an elite college in the northeast United States with a long history of educating academically gifted youth.”)

Other distinctions between wealthy and poor students are less visible. Closing the dining hall during academic breaks might make sense if the assumption is that all students travel on holiday. But students who can’t afford to travel find their main source of food suddenly unavailable. Some told Jack that spring break is like a literal version of The Hunger Games. One told him she fainted because she didn’t have enough food. Among institutions that promised financial-aid packages that wouldn’t burden disadvantaged students with loans, Jack found only one in four kept their dining halls open during spring break.

Research into the struggles of poor students on campuses has surged in recent years, much of it focused on the role their family backgrounds play in their success. Jack’s work is distinctive in examining the differences between poor students who graduated from distressed public high schools and those who attended resource-rich private schools.

Enter the “privileged poor” — students who, like Jack, through grit and luck managed to attend private schools despite their family’s low income. They had the benefit of being steeped in the world of the rich early. That helped prevent culture shock and gave them tools to navigate college. The “doubly disadvantaged,” in contrast, had gone to high schools that weren’t able to prepare them for the exclusive world of elite institutions.

The privileged poor whom Jack interviewed were better equipped to take advantage of all the resources the university had to offer. They sought out their professors to help them when they were struggling in class. Their counterparts often failed to do so. An administrator at another college told Jack she realized that some of her low-income students thought “office hours” meant hours that belonged to her, during which she shouldn’t be disturbed. That reveals more than a mere miscommunication, Jack argues; it represents the “gaps in expectations between faculty and students about what is required to succeed in college.”

The privileged poor also knew it was important to join clubs and network with people who could be vital connections in the future. The doubly disadvantaged not only didn’t share that attitude, but actually considered it “sucking up.” One student who worked hard to get good grades in high school described learning quickly that it wouldn’t be enough just to study hard in college. But he couldn’t bring himself to change.

“These kids who go to professors after class and just talk to them,” the student told Jack. “I have no idea what they’re talking about. I don’t have any questions beyond what they’re teaching. They’re kiss-asses! These people want recommendations, a spot in this guy’s research team. I never wanted to grovel.”

Jack understands that hesitation. His mother “couldn’t have told me that navigating college requires a huge amount of self-promotion,” he says. “She always wants the best for me, but she wasn’t equipped to navigate these mainstream institutions.”

The vast majority of college students don’t get the chance to go to places like Harvard. A disproportionate number of first-generation and minority students go to colleges with far fewer resources and, accordingly, lower graduation rates. Why should we be concerned about low-income students who have landed through grit and good fortune at an elite college?

People who knew Jack at Amherst say his personal story, even as it seems to show that the system worked, is exceptional. Kristin Bumiller, a political-science professor at Amherst, recalls Jack holding down multiple jobs while working diligently at his studies. (Jack says he would frequently send money home to his family.) “In many ways, he is not the full embodiment of his work,” Bumiller says. “He is someone who has used hard work and perseverance to succeed no matter the conditions of his academic environment.”

Like the privileged poor in his research, Jack learned how to seek out help when he needed it. He says he is not much of a networker, but he knows how to build a network. That includes Shamus Khan, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, whom Jack asked for advice on his research. (Jack calls him his “toughest critic and biggest supporter.”) Khan says it’s obvious that Jack’s work and personal life were affected by the disparities he experienced on campus. And at the beginning, Khan said, it seemed as though Jack believed telling the stories alone would be enough. “The most brutal kind of review that I would give Tony and that I pushed him on was, ‘Who cares?’” Khan says. “So a bunch of kids are having a tough time at Harvard?”

He pushed Jack to be more theoretical. Much of the recent work on social mobility has focused on who gets in the door, and what it takes to get admitted. Plenty has also been written about the experiences of poor students once they arrive on campus. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2013), by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, examined how wealthy students fared better than their lower-income classmates at a large public university. And scholars have begun writing about students who suffer from hunger or homelessness. Jack’s emphasis on highly selective institutions reveals that students lacking the social capital gained at private high schools are made to remember it over and over. “Elite universities are now a bundle of confusing contradictions,” Jack writes. “They bend over backward to admit disadvantaged students into their hallowed halls, but then, once the students are there, they maintain policies that not only remind those students of their disadvantage, but even serve to highlight it.”

Jack has struggled to find a balance between calling out what he sees as brutally unfair treatment and maintaining a scholarly distance. It can be hard to remain composed when students are literally starving during spring break. And it can be heartbreaking to see colleges’ efforts to help backfire. That was the case when Renowned University decided to offer free vouchers for cultural events that poor students wouldn’t be able to attend otherwise. The problem? They made the students line up at a separate door, effectively broadcasting to their well-off peers that they were the poor bunch.

Nowhere is the struggle clearer in The Privileged Poor than when Jack writes about a work-study program called “Community Detail,” a master class in good intentions gone awry. One of several voluntary summer programs Renowned University offered incoming freshmen, Community Detail gave students a decently paid job with flexible hours cleaning dorm rooms. The other summer programs, focused on hiking or art appreciation, cost a fee. So Community Detail, Jack argues, was really the only choice for poor students, and it meant they ended up cleaning filthy bathrooms, mopping up bodily fluids, and doing other menial work for their better-off peers.

“I’m going to clean the toilet that you just threw up on this past weekend when you’re partying like crazy,” as one student described it to Jack. “Let me just clean that for you. And then just add the fact that I’m a minority reinforces that stereotype that all Spanish people do is clean and mow lawns. That’s what they’re good for.”

It’s not just that the work was degrading or disgusting, Jack writes; the problem was it eroded the basis for an academic identity before the students had even really started their journey.

To Jack, what Renowned was doing to its students was appalling, and he struggled to convey his outrage in sober terms. “You have to detach yourself in a way that’s hard for me as a first-gen, lower-income student who has been in these students’ shoes,” he says. “To be completely divorced and write it up like, ‘I am an unbiased researcher.’”

A lack of bias, though, can be useful when Jack offers up solutions. Would it help if more students from poor backgrounds were recruited into well-off private schools, perhaps with federal funds? Jack says that would be unfair to the kids inevitably left behind. It could also mean siphoning money out of already bereft public schools.

“Funneling poor youth into private schools is not social policy,” he writes. “It’s an abdication of responsibility.”

His proposed solution? Governments should invest more in poor communities. High schools should make students familiar with college culture earlier — some, for example, have started calling conferences “office hours.” And colleges? Well, for one thing, they should keep the dining halls open during breaks.

Jack says he considers himself not a public intellectual, but an intellectual who engages with the public: He’s not interested in academic celebrity, but in earning tenure at Harvard, maybe someday owning a house, and continuing to do work he finds useful.

The office, the book, the whirlwind of public speaking — all of this success still seems unreal to Jack, and he has a sentimental streak. When he went to see his book being printed, the years of work finally metamorphosed into a physical form, he cried.