Access ain’t Inclusion
by Sebabatso Manoeli
with Anthony A. Jack
“What’s the point of opening doors to a more diverse group of students if they’re going to continue to have a separate and unequal experience on campus? That’s the fundamental question that universities do not typically ask themselves.”
This week, Race Beyond Borders hosts award-winning sociologist Anthony A. Jack for a conversation about racial and class equity in institutions for higher learning. Specifically, we focus on what Anthony calls the “paradox of the privileged poor,” a concept he coined to examine how social class works on campus.
Anthony’s work pushes institutions to think about and work towards inclusion in more expansive ways than merely providing access. We note how the insights emerging from this conversation are applicable to any institution attempting to create cultures of belonging.
He unpacks his research findings about the compounding social and structural hurdles that students from low-income backgrounds experience on college campuses. These range from culture shock to enduring housing and food insecurity in the face of opulence, especially at elite institutions.
He notes how the hidden curriculum – the unwritten rules about how to gain access to institutional resources, including crucial relationships with professors and peers – on one hand often alienates racial and other minorities, and on the other, supports the advancements of students from elite backgrounds.
For more, listen here.
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Anthony Abraham Jack is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and an Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His work on first generation college students in the United States has received critical acclaim. His first book, The Privilege Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students 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. His research documents the overlooked diversity among lower income undergraduates, what he calls the Doubly Disadvantaged, who enter college from local, typically distressed public schools, as well as what he calls the Privileged Poor, who do so from boarding, day and preparatory high schools. His work appears in The Common Reader, the Dubois Review, the Sociological Forum, and Sociology for Education.