Rate My Professor Anthony Abraham Jack

Anthony Abraham Jack serves as the inaugural Faculty Director of the Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, where he holds a tenured position since 2021. He is also an affiliate of the Department of Sociology and the Center for Innovation in Social Science at Boston University. Jack received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 2016, an A.M. in Sociology from the same institution in 2011, and a B.A. cum laude in Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion from Amherst College in 2007. Prior to joining Boston University, he was Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 2018 to 2023, Shutzer Assistant Professor and Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute from 2018 to 2023, James Patterson Fellow at Vanderbilt University from 2018 to 2023, Faculty Fellow at Pforzheimer House, Harvard from 2016 to 2020, and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2016 to 2020. In 2020, Muhlenberg College awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters for his contributions to transforming higher education.

Jack’s scholarship centers on the overlooked diversity among lower-income undergraduates, particularly the “privileged poor”—those attending elite colleges from preparatory schools—and the “doubly disadvantaged” from local public high schools. His research interests include culture, education, race/ethnicity, children and youth, poverty, inequality, and qualitative methods. He authored Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price (Princeton University Press, 2024), which received the 2026 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, among others, and The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Harvard University Press, 2019), honored with awards such as the 2020 Mirra Komarovsky Book Award and 2019 Critics’ Choice Book Award. Notable publications include “(No) Harm in Asking: Class, Acquired Cultural Capital, and Academic Engagement at an Elite University” (Sociology of Education, 2016), which won the 2015 SSP Educational Problems Division Graduate Student Paper Award, and “Belonging and Boundaries at an Elite University” (Social Problems, 2024). Jack has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the 2015 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. His work has significantly impacted discussions on equity in higher education, earning recognition from the American Sociological Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, and others.