On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Anthony Jack, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a fellow former resident of Mather House. Jack’s research documents the overlooked diversity among lower income undergraduates, the doubly-disadvantaged, those who enter college from local, typically distressed public high schools, and the privileged poor, his term for those who do so from boarding day and prep schools. 

Jack is the author of the new Harvard University Press title, “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Poor Students.” He writes, “The experiences of low-income undergraduates are not just a product of their family background and economic circumstance. Academic life is inherently social. Focusing solely on grades or graduation rates obscures that fact. Imagine the culture shock that some lower income students experience navigating this hidden curriculum.”