Anthony Abraham Jack has written an important, passionate analysis of the conditions and challenges facing students from lower-income families and underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds at Harvard—and by extension, at other elite, selective-admissions institutions. The book is important because Jack’s scholarship focuses on what happens when such schools welcome more diverse students (read about his first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students), and he is an unusually sensitive interviewer of his subjects, eliciting perspectives that are not always heard—and not always easy to hear. It is angry because his new work, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price (Princeton University Press) unveils enormous historical and contemporary gaps between student cohorts and the way those differences play out on campus—and Jack is passionate about remedying the adverse effects he documents. Given concerns about admissions, the diversity of student bodies, and the role of higher education in promoting socioeconomic mobility, Class Dismissed has plenty to add to current conversations.
Class Dismissed arose from a natural experiment: the experiences of community members from widely differing circumstances when the COVID-19 pandemic forced Harvard to disperse students from campus abruptly in March 2020, in most cases back to their homes. Jack, Ph.D. ’16—then a Harvard assistant professor of education and Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, now associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University and faculty director of its Newbury Center for first-generation students—set out to detail the ensuing lives of lower- and upper-income cohorts. The former were eligible for the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (from families with incomes then under $65,000); the latter from those above that threshold—the “vast majority,” he writes, “from families that made much more than $65,000.”
Although he conducted his interviews during the pandemic, and naturally emphasizes the extreme conditions brought into relief then, his broader conclusions concern the continuing disparities separating the lives and undergraduate experiences of students from very different circumstances brought together in places like Harvard. Those challenges and Jack’s insights about how to address them matter most and are the focus of this review.
Two Different Worlds
Immediately apparent is the way Jack’s interviews with 125 students —by Zoom from January to October 2021, with follow-up conversations in late 2022—translate those bloodless income strata into the realities of American inequality. For one affluent student, the 2020 closure meant buying a plane ticket and jetting home to Marin County, California, with Muir Woods right at hand for fresh air and relaxing runs. For another student runner, it meant returning home to a small Ohio town where, she said, “We don’t walk around my neighborhood”—so the departure from campus meant, literally, leaving behind the relative safety and security of runs along the Charles. For many such students, Jack’s interviews reveal, the transition from Cambridge to home meant a blunt return to a far more circumscribed world: one where, because of the pandemic exigencies, housing often became more crowded, more likely to expose students to the virus as family members maintained in-person service jobs, and ever less conducive to continued academic work. And of course, class meetings from home on Zoom could make such disparities much more vividly apparent than any in-person meeting in a seminar room ever would.
Toggling between students who matter-of-factly described resort vacations with blocking mates (paid for by parents, of course) and those whose urban neighborhood routines include gunfire, Jack can burn bright. In a not atypical passage, he writes of students’ very different life circumstances (not only during the pandemic), “I implore university administrators, especially those who set campus policy, to grapple with the legacy of slavery and settler colonialism that pervades our society and system of education.” Some readers will resonate to that analysis and anger; others will object that he notes only infrequently that the “deep-seated problems” his interviewees describe “are nearly impossible to escape from” and that “Universities cannot always shield students from the ugliness of life.”
It would be unfortunate, and a major missed opportunity, for those put off by the overarching analysis of historic racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequalities to turn aside from the potent, practical things Jack recommends, things universities that recruit and enroll more diverse students can and ought to do now.
The Bubble, Popped
“Lower-income students…had no illusion about what awaited them at home,” Jack writes in a chapter titled “Beyond These Walls.” “After all,” he continues, “Harvard had been their way to escape…the conditions that made being home hard.”
And how: it may be difficult for most College students to process a peer’s “funny story,” as she related it to Jack:
I get a call from my family. They were about to go to bed. Suddenly they hear a loud noise. Turns out there’s a bullet hole in the house. A stray bullet went into the house. Luckily, no one was injured, but it was in a path that could have injured someone. It went through the outside wall, went kind of across the stairway, and got lodged into the other side of the wall.
Another, from Chicago’s South Side, signed up for the neighborhood social app; that way, as he embedded in Harvard, he could monitor “community safety updates and notifications”—most commonly “about gunshots, robberies, and stabbings.…[T]he app almost never brought good news. Just different types of bad.”
The essence of such stories is that for students enabled to leave home and enroll at a place like Harvard, college is almost never a bubble: the realities of their families’ lives are very much a part of their mental and emotional makeup, often chillingly refreshed in real time, and sometimes intruding more directly.
An immediate conclusion follows. The students from low-income families, under-resourced communities, or first-generation families who gain admission to demanding, elite colleges and universities are obviously resilient—but not infinitely so. When they struggle academically, they may have fewer built-in support systems—and the worst thing institutions can do is to put them on leave and send them back to those challenging communities. As Jack puts it:
If a student at Harvard elects to take leave because of an internship, or because they want to explore the world, they must inform their resident dean or another member of the office of the dean of students that they are leaving; at some unspecified later time, they must tell the university what semester they intend to come back. That’s it.
But at lots of institutions, “Students asked or mandated to leave do not have the same freedom. They lose campus privileges, from grants and summer research opportunities to the services that would help them manage the gap. What’s more, these students face numerous and far more daunting requirements to return.” In effect, as he bluntly summarizes, “[M]any college policies effectively penalized students further for being put on leave.…[They] are punished for the insecurities that structure their lives—things that are by definition beyond their control.”
At a minimum, Jack’s description of how background and family and community life differ among students from different backgrounds, unforgettably detailed in the students’ own voices, must be kept in mind as they make their way through their studies. To put it another way, admission to a prestigious school, like the birth of a child, is an incredible adrenaline rush—but the care provided in the years that follow tells the tale.
The World of Work
Jack is especially good in using students’ pandemic experiences to tease out the meaning of work during their undergraduate years. The fortunate and well-connected could, as one of his subjects did, take a gap year in 2020-2021, pursuing an unpaid internship at a venture capital firm. Those less fortunate returned home and, in one case, began working nearly full time, unpaid, to support her father’s Dallas swimming-pool cleaning business—while taking classes remotely. Others, also unpaid, mastered software programs and general management to help in the family landscaping business, or worked in the family restaurant to help make ends meet. The first student had an experience that could help shape her future career choices, complete with a valuable credential for her resume. The latter, whose jobs involved far more in the way of learning and practicing meaningful skills, would be left with…what?
Jack documents the vastly different work experiences of upper- and lower-income students during normal times. It takes financial means to be able to pursue unpaid, professional internships—much as it may take prior academic experience and exposure to connect to on-campus jobs as research associates or teaching assistants. In contrast, “Almost as one, lower-income students shared stories of the very adult responsibilities they had as kids, many of which followed them to college,” he summarizes. That meant working, often a lot, during the term to send money home, and often in the kinds of hourly service jobs the students had held down in high school.
The routine ways students find employment, Jack emphasizes, just don’t cut it: “Job fairs embody the presumptions that we make about our students—that they are comfortable marketing themselves and schmoozing with grownups—all things that are second nature to many wealthy kids and terrifying to many (albeit not all) low-income kids.” He is not under any illusions: “Not everyone, to be clear, is interested in research or working with a professor. Those positions should not be held as the gold standard per se.”
But such opportunities are being (unintentionally) squandered. Research assistantships and teaching or mentoring positions “do provide access to influential gatekeepers, those who can provide guidance on postgraduation plans as well as the letters of recommendation needed to secure those positions.”
It would seem an easy, high-leverage proposition to devise paths into such (paid) work for students who may not know how to access it readily, and to share with them the chance to broaden their educational experience and accumulate social capital.
Life Experience
One way of categorizing these and other findings from Class Dismissed is to be explicit about students’ life experience: how their preparation not only got them admitted to an elite college, but how it shapes their journey through classwork, paid work, extracurriculars (if their continuing family obligations leave them the time), and relationships with intellectual mentors and advisers—all the things that will widen their opportunities in school and after graduation. As Jack’s interviewees make clear, those experiences before, during, and after college are radically stratified.
All of which summons the present moment. As has now been widely reported, Harvard College and many other institutions enrolled undergraduate cohorts this fall—the class of 2028—that differ from those in prior years, reflecting the changes in admissions mandated by the June 2023 Supreme Court decision prohibiting the consideration of race (affirmative action) in admissions. The Court did permit institutions to consider applicants’ pertinent life experiences, prompting the College to ask them to write an essay responding to this question: “How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?” (Many peer institutions acted similarly.) But by traditional measures, many schools’ classes are now less diverse.
At a time when Harvard and peer selective institutions are eager to maintain and enhance the perceived learning benefits of diversity, along many dimensions, the essence of Jack’s research is, perhaps, to challenge colleges to truly embrace that expressed interest in attracting to their community people with diverse life experiences—and to recognize, honor, and support those experiences, in all their strengths and challenges, once they enroll.
