PositiveThe New YorkerInstead of consigning low-income undergraduates, as university policies and scholarly articles often do, to one homogenous minority, [Jack] proposes a more nuanced language to describe and address the needs of different contingents. His research illuminates how and why the \'privileged poor,\' whose experiences at competitive private schools have primed them for academic success, outperform their \'doubly disadvantaged\' peers, who have languished in underfunded public schools ... Jack spent hundreds of hours listening to his subjects, offering attention and advice in seemingly equal measure. The lasting beauty of his ethnography is that it gives a voice to the students who, as his research ends up revealing, most need it.
