Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price

by Anthony Abraham Jack Narrated by Anthony Abraham Jack

Overview

This audiobook narrated by Anthony Abraham Jack reveals the entrenched inequities that harm our most vulnerable students and what colleges can do to help them excel

Elite colleges are boasting unprecedented numbers with respect to diversity, with some schools admitting their first majority-minority classes. But when the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial unrest gripped the world, schools scrambled to figure out what to do with the diversity they so fervently recruited. And disadvantaged students suffered. Class Dismissed exposes how woefully unprepared colleges were to support these students and shares their stories of how they were left to weather the storm alone and unprotected.

Drawing on the firsthand experiences of students from all walks of life at elite colleges, Anthony Abraham Jack reveals the out-of-sight and unequal worlds students navigated before and during the pandemic closures and upon their return to campus. He shows how COVID-19 exacerbated the very inequalities that universities ignored or failed to address long before campus closures. Jack examines how students dealt with the disruptions caused by the pandemic, how they navigated social unrest, and how they grappled with problems of race both on campus and off.

A provocative and much-needed book, Class Dismissed paints an intimate and unflinchingly candid portrait of the challenges of undergraduate life for disadvantaged students even in the elite schools that invest millions to diversify their student body. Moreover, Jack offers guidance on how to make students' path to graduation less treacherous-guidance colleges would be wise to follow.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2024-05-23
A scholarly investigation of diverse college students’ experiences when campuses closed during the pandemic.

As a first-generation college student, Jack, a professor of higher education leadership and the author ofThe Privileged Poor, knows just how difficult it can be to be a Black, working-class undergraduate, both from his personal experience and his scholarly research. When college campuses shut down in 2020, the author—with the help of research assistants—began the process of interviewing 125 “Asian, Black, Latino, Mixed, Native, and White” Harvard undergraduates about their pandemic-related hiatuses. The trends that emerged from this research highlighted the disparities between students of different races and classes during this troubling time. For example, Jack found that while wealthy students used their time off campus to travel and participate in career-boosting, unpaid internships, working-class students scrambled to supplement vital lost income and to balance academic work with unpaid labor, sometimes while coping with dangerous home lives. In another example, the author uncovers how wealth did not always mitigate harm: While wealthy white students enjoyed outdoor spaces during the pandemic, students of color often lived in fear of leaving their homes, regardless of their economic privilege. Jack’s findings troubled colleges’ celebrations of the unprecedented diversity of incoming classes, begging the question, “Do colleges know how to support a diverse class of students, or do they just know how to foot the bill for one?” Jack’s findings are sobering, well supported, and trenchantly reported. His sampling is particularly impressive, encompassing students from a variety of race and class combinations rarely seen in educational research. For example, he writes that he and his research assistants “interviewed nearly all the students at Harvard who identified as Native.” His compassionate, conversational tone renders this a compulsively readable, powerfully argued book.

A stunning analysis of the effects of Covid-era campus closings on diverse student populations.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192020883
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	08/13/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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