Class Dismissed

August 16, 2024

The COVID pandemic brought many changes and challenges around the world. For Jack (higher education leadership, Boston Univ.; The Privileged Poor), who was teaching at Harvard when the pandemic began, the pandemic exacerbated the ways in which higher education institutions provide different experiences to students of varying socioeconomic statuses. For this book, he interviewed students across the socioeconomic spectrum, focusing on family and work situations, along with the reactions to how Harvard and its students handle inequities. The student interviews clearly illustrate how differently the same university policy can affect each student. For instance, the closure of Harvard's campus was fine for students who could travel or who had safe, comfortable homes to return to. For others, however, their homes were not safe or, in the case of unhoused students, nonexistent, so such a policy could lead to disastrous consequences. VERDICT This book provides a thoughtful look at varying student experiences during the pandemic. It asserts that universities could do more to recognize and work towards helping students of all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds while resolving the inequities among their students on campus.--Amber Gray

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Starred review from July 1, 2024
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 of The 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.

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