190621 - The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students

Séminaire scientifique de l'OSC 2018-2019 "The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students", Séminaire joint OSC-CEE

Vendredi 21 juin 2019 de 11h30 à 13h, Sciences Po, Salle Annick Percheron, 98, rue de l'Université 75007 Paris

Speaker: Anthony Abraham Jack (Assistant Professor of Education, Harvard)
Anthony Abraham Jack (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2016) is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He holds the Shutzer Assistant Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

The book reveals how―and why―disadvantaged students struggle at elite colleges, and explains what these schools can do differently if these students are to thrive.

College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to let them in? In fact, the struggles of less privileged students continue long after they’ve arrived on campus. In their first weeks they quickly learn that admission does not mean acceptance. Anthony Jack documents how university policies and cultures can exacerbate preexisting inequalities, and reveals why these policies hit some students harder than others.

Despite their lofty aspirations, top colleges hedge their bets by recruiting their new diversity largely from the same old sources, admitting scores of lower-income black, Latino, and white undergraduates from elite private high schools. These students approach their new campuses very differently from students who attended local, and typically troubled, public high schools and are often left to flounder on their own.

Drawing on interviews with dozens of undergraduates at one of America’s most famous colleges and on his own experiences as one of the privileged poor, Jack describes the lives poor students bring with them and shows how powerfully background affects their chances of success.

He provides concrete advice to help schools reduce these hidden disadvantages.

Register is mandatory for external audience (bernard.corminboeuf@sciencespo.fr).