Anthony Abraham Jack, Ph.D.
Inaugural faculty director of the Newbury Center and associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University
Anthony Abraham Jack, Ph.D. (FAN ’19, ’24), is the inaugural faculty director of the Newbury Center and associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Times Higher Education and on NPR and CNN. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. His latest book is Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price, published in 2024.
Jack, a native of Miami, received a scholarship to attend Gulliver Preparatory School, an elite private high school in South Florida. He went on to receive degrees from Amherst College and Harvard University. Formerly, Jack was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The National Review, The Washington Post, The Hechinger Report, American RadioWorks, and NPR have featured his research and writing as well as biographical profiles of his experiences as a first-generation college student.
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,” those who do so from boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. His scholarship appears in the Du Bois Review, Sociological Forum, and Sociology of Education and has earned awards from the American Sociological Association, 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 2015 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow. The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan named him a 2016 Emerging Diversity Scholar.
