Princeton University Press
Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price
Key Metrics
- Anthony Abraham Jack
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691237466
- -
- -
- Education > Higher
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Class Dismissed reveals the entrenched inequities that harm our most vulnerable students and what colleges can do to help them excel
Elite colleges are boasting unprecedented numbers with respect to diversity, with some schools admitting their first majority-minority classes. But when the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial unrest gripped the world, schools scrambled to figure out what to do with the diversity they so fervently recruited. And disadvantaged students suffered. Class Dismissed exposes how woefully unprepared colleges were to support these students and shares their stories of how they were left to weather the storm alone and unprotected.
Drawing on the firsthand experiences of students from all walks of life at elite colleges, Anthony Abraham Jack reveals the out-of-sight and unequal worlds students navigated before and during the pandemic closures and upon their return to campus. He shows how COVID-19 exacerbated the very inequalities that universities ignored or failed to address long before campus closures. Jack examines how students dealt with the disruptions caused by the pandemic, how they navigated social unrest, and how they grappled with problems of race both on campus and off.
A provocative and much-needed book, Class Dismissed paints an intimate and unflinchingly candid portrait of the challenges of undergraduate life for disadvantaged students even in the elite schools that invest millions to diversify their student body. Moreover, Jack offers guidance on how to make students' path to graduation less treacherous--guidance colleges would be wise to follow.
Author Bio
Anthony Abraham Jack (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2016) is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an assistant professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He holds the Shutzer Assistant Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
His research documents the overlooked diversity among lower-income undergraduates: the Doubly Disadvantaged — those who enter college from local, typically distressed public high schools — and Privileged Poor — those who do so from boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. His scholarship appears in the Common Reader, Du Bois Review, Sociological Forum, and Sociology of Education and has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, American Sociological Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Jack held fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation and was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow. The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan named him an Emerging Diversity Scholar. In May 2020, Muhlenberg College will award him an honorary doctorate for his work in transforming higher education.
The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Huffington Post, The Nation, American Conservative Magazine, The National Review, Commentary Magazine, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Times Higher Education, Vice, Vox, and NPR have featured his research and writing as well as biographical profiles of his experiences as a first-generation college student. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students is his first book.
Source: Harvard Graduate School of Education
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