The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, written by Anthony Jack ’07, was recently reviewed by The New Yorker as “A Refreshing Antidote to Our Obsession with the College-Admissions Scandal.”
“Recent debates over privilege and adversity in higher education have evinced a myopic obsession with the question of access: who gets in, and why,” wrote The New Yorker’s Eren Orbey. “Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion. Rather than parse the spurious meritocracy of admissions, his book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising.”
“Jack spent hundreds of hours listening to his subjects, offering attention and advice in seemingly equal measure. The lasting beauty of his ethnography is that it gives a voice to the students who, as his research ends up revealing, most need it,” Orbey wrote.
Update: Jack recently brought his message to the Association of American Medical Colleges, as speaker at the AAMC's Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. "What I want all graduate students, all graduate schools to understand, whether it's professional or for research, is the same thing I'm trying to get colleges to fully commit to believing: Acceptance does not wash away poverty, it does not wash away disadvantage," he said in an interview with AAMC News. "These students aren’t looking for a handout. They’re ready to put in the work of going to medical school. If you’re willing to do that, you're not taking the easy road out."