Elite colleges have made headlines for enrolling historically diverse classes, with some welcoming majority-minority cohorts for the first time. But when the twin crises of COVID-19 and racial unrest erupted, those same institutions were caught flat-footed—woefully unprepared to support the very students they had so proudly recruited.
In his urgent and unflinching new book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price, Dr. Anthony Jack exposes how structurally marginalized students were left to weather the storm alone. Drawing on the firsthand experiences of undergraduates from a range of backgrounds, Jack reveals the hidden and unequal realities students faced before, during, and after campus closures. From food insecurity and housing instability to the emotional toll of racial trauma and isolation, Class Dismissed paints a sobering picture of how elite colleges failed to live up to their promises of inclusion.
We sat down with Dr. Jack to discuss his much-needed follow-up to The Privileged Poor—a book that doesn’t just diagnose the problem, but offers a roadmap for how colleges can make students’ paths to graduation less treacherous. It’s a conversation higher education can’t afford to ignore.
You wrote that “Diversity void of understanding is worse than a broken promise; it is one that was never intended to be kept.” What did you mean by that?
Any kind of recruitment for any group of students you’re recruiting—whether its veterans, whether its students from lower income backgrounds, whether its students from rural backgrounds, whether its international students, or whether its students who are first from their families to go to colleges—if you don’t prepare for their arrival, especially how their experiences are different from those who you traditionally have gone after, have catered to, have built your policies around, then there's a serious disconnect between proclamation and practice, right? There's a disconnect between what you say and what you're doing.
To extend invitations to eager, able and excited students without preparing for their arrival is doing them a disservice from day one. You don't have an adequate system of support to help make sure that they just don’t get in, but they graduate.
And as I say in my work, I don't want students to just graduate. I want them to do so whole and healthy, ready for the next adventure, not limping across the stage, saying “I'll never set foot on this or any other campus again.” Sadly, that has been the reality for generations, for so many people. Think about the first group of women who entered these colleges. Think about the first Black or Latino or Asian students who entered these colleges, both individually and as a group. There was a lot of pain, and even if those people went on to lead prosperous lives of service, leadership, or whatever marker that we are defining of success that doesn't undercut the social emotional cost that mobility sometimes places upon us.
You’ve written that 2020 was merely the turning point in which the rest of the world found out what students had been dealing with for a long time. Five years on, I’m wondering if you think anything has truly been done with that knowledge.
The scary part for me is that 2020 revealed, in a new and unfiltered ways, what students were going through. Sadly 2025 is shaping up to be a time when universities’ hands are tied behind their backs, preventing them from actually being there to support students in the way that they need it. So much about this conversation around DEI is really like a boogeyman. It is used to scare and draw up emotions and induce fear when in reality, the very programs that are being sunsetted because of these anti-DEI initiatives are actually student success and student retention efforts.
We are only as good as our citizenry is educated. Any country, company, college, it doesn't matter. You are only as good as your citizenry is educated, but you are also only as good as how diverse your educated citizenry is. Anti-DEI initiatives are not anything more than a political tool to say, “We want things to go back the way they once were, from boardrooms and dorm rooms.”
How are you hoping higher ed institutions meet this moment?
It’s almost impossible to know what one can and cannot do, because the landscape is literally changing by the hour. When it comes to admissions, I hope colleges respond to what the Supreme Court says in its ruling and not bow down to nongovernmental groups that are trying to scare them into acting beyond the scope of the law. We saw some school close scholarship programs for Native and Indigenous groups yet the Supreme Court decision in SFFA didn’t outlaw such scholarships. With respect to bans and the assault on programs labeled “DEI,” I hope that college take an offensive approach and defend their programming and actions that underscore student support, bolster retention, and promote well-being. It will go beyond changing the name, but rather showing the hypocrisy of such attacks and exposing the truth about just how many groups these programs help.
What are you exploring next? How and where do we need to focus our attention on widening inequality in these challenging times?
We need to be very careful, because I think the policies we are seeing now are only going too exacerbate existing inequalities, especially in wealth. We will see a further concentration of wealth at the top, and at a faster rate than we did before. And so it's going to be very important for us to be able to understand who we help and how we help.
And I think we need a new definition of what basic needs actually are on college campuses. That is an important first starting point with growing wealth inequalities and growing class inequalities, we need to fundamentally understand what is the new definition of basic needs that colleges can work and to strive for, because when it comes to basic needs, basic needs cuts across all groups. It’s not a paristan thing. Basic needs are basic needs.
But amidst this all, it’s like student students' voices have been completely erased from the conversation. Everything is being framed as a battle between institutions, but the undergraduate experience is not present. We need to center student voices, because their lived experiences will help us understand the impact of larger policies, and they will help us shape better policies going forward.