The Qualities We Carry

Shandra Jones, Ph.D.'25, was on the fence about going back to school. Getting a Ph.D. is a long commitment, and Jones wanted to make sure there was real value in getting another degree. It was also important, she says, to fully know her “why” before applying. 

Her why turned out to be a calling to equity work, work that started when she realized the impact that growing up in a close-knit, primarily all-Black working-class community in Prichard, Alabama, had on her identity, and, ultimately, her success as a first-gen, low-income student. 

“From the beginning, I was raised by a single mother. I believe, at some point, my mom made something in the ballpark of $35 more than the cutoff to receive state-level income-based assistance,” she says, qualifying her for reduced but not free lunch.

“As a result of all of those experiences,” she says, “I grew up knowing that being Black, being someone whose family had low wealth, and frankly also coming from the deep south in the Southeast United States, meant that there were assumptions about the types of success and opportunity that would be available to me. But I also grew up very clearly recognizing how smart the folks in my community were, how capable they were. I could see that even in my own family and in my immediate neighborhood, folks had more potential than they had had opportunities in the past.” 

With the support of her community and teachers along the way, Jones was able to access her own opportunities, like a gifted program and private high school. She was accepted to Stanford. After graduation, she says she was even more aware that the people she was leaving behind in her community weren’t less capable than she was. 

“They were folks for whom there was a different set of contextual variables that impacted their outcomes,” she says, “Why was my experience being successful, not only navigating to college, but then through college and through career pathways, so distinctly different? I was like, something else is different here.” 

Jones was determined to figure out what that something else was.

She spent almost a decade in college administration, working in admissions, student services, and financial aid, focused on equity. And for the last eight years in the Ph.D. Program, including working as a senior research assistant with the Adolescent Ethnic-Racial Identity Development Lab and as a lead research fellow with the Harvard NextGen Initiative, Jones explored the impact ethnic and racial identity  — a sense of what your ethnic and racial group membership means to you and the process you undergo to find that meaning — has on student success. 

“What we understand from the literature is that it is a natural, universal kind of evolution as humans, that as we become young adults, we're wrestling with thoughts about who we are,” she says. “We're wrestling with thoughts around education decisions, career decisions. We're thinking about romantic relationships. We're thinking about all these things as we become young adults. And part of thinking through all of that is implicated with who we are racially and ethnically because race and ethnicity are so important in our communities. It's just part of the soup that we all simmer in that race and ethnicity matter.”

And because it matters, she says, “then it also matters when we’re trying to make sense of who we are and who we're going to show up as, and the types of decisions we make as we get into young adulthood.” For college students, Jones says, that includes deciding what classes to take, what clubs to join, who to hang out with, where to live, and who to live with. “All these things are now very self-directed and that context has racial and ethnic implications within it.”

What she discovered and explored in her dissertation, after extensive research and leading a nationwide survey of 755 undergraduate college students in the United States, is that students do better academically, socially, and mentally in college and later in their careers when they are exposed to curriculum and programs that help them better understand their ethnic-racial identity and who they are. This “portfolio of assets” is something that everyone carries, she says. “These are the fuels for our superpowers, and if we can better understand the complexity of that portfolio of assets, then as colleges, universities, and educators, we can make better policies. We can have better practices that really support the thriving and success of our students.”

Looking beyond graduation, Jones is settling in with her family in Durham, North Carolina, where she will be working with Self-Help Credit Union, one arm of Self-Help, a national mission-driven organization that invests in underserved communities, helping to spur economic opportunity and justice. 

“We do a lot of increased emphasis around supporting rural communities, communities with low wealth, first-time homeowners, business owners who are women, folks of color, and other folks from marginalized communities,” says Jones. “I'm really thrilled to be doing work as one of their executive staff members. For me, it’s the dream of bringing this very academic and evidence-based approach to the practice of the work of equity.”

She says she’s also excited to be graduating at the same time as her oldest daughter, who is finishing high school. “She's graduating literally two weeks after me,” Jones says. “That's been the surprise benefit of taking a little longer than I expected with my Ph.D. Program — we are now graduating together.”