The US Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard made it illegal for colleges and universities to use race as a factor in choosing their incoming classes. As a result, schools are working harder than ever to recruit and admit first-generation and lower-income applicants to preserve the diversity of their student bodies. But the Boston University sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack says American higher education wasn’t ready for the diversity they were recruiting before the Court's ruling—and they're still not ready now. His research shows how schools often fail to acknowledge the inequities of class and race that students bring to campus from home. The solution? Pop the campus bubble and begin looking at the ways that place impacts the challenges low-income and first-generation students face. 

Anthony Abraham Jack is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Newbury Center at Boston University, where he is an associate professor of higher education leadership at the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. He has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education, among others. His first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, earned awards from the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the Eastern Sociological Association and was named one of National Public Radio’s Best Books of 2019. His second book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality, and Students Pay the Price, won the PROSE Award in Education Theory and Practice from the Association of American Publishers. Anthony Abraham Jack received his PhD in sociology from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 2016.