Conceptualizing educational opportunity hoarding: the emergence of hoarding without hoarders

Abstract

Social scientists increasingly use the concept of opportunity hoarding to explain the formation of Black-White educational inequalities. However, this concept is often loosely defined, leading to varied interpretations of the inequality-producing mechanisms it captures. To bring clarity to this valuable sociological concept, this theoretical paper, informed by the concept's original definition and existing empirical research, proposes a more precise definition of opportunity hoarding and formalizes it through a computational model. For concreteness, the model focuses on one context: how White families can hoard access to advanced high school coursework from Black students attending the same school. Through simulations, the paper highlights the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the hoarding of advanced course-taking opportunities emerges. Results demonstrate that, in contrast to traditional accounts, White actors do not need to engage in exclusionary behaviors to hoard valuable resources. Rather, through the byproduct of network segregation and class inequalities, opportunity hoarding can emerge even when individuals act in race-neutral ways -- a process I conceptualize as hoarding without hoarders.