Hoarding without hoarders: unpacking the emergence of opportunity hoarding within schools

Sociologists of education increasingly highlight the role of opportunity hoarding in the formation of Black-White educational inequalities. Informed by this literature, this article unpacks the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the hoarding of educational resources emerges within schools. It develops a qualitatively informed agent-based model which captures Black and White students' competition for a valuable school resource: advanced coursework. In contrast to traditional accounts -- which explain the emergence of hoarding through the actions of Whites that keep valuable resources within White communities -- simulations, perhaps surprisingly, show hoarding to arise even when Whites do not play the role of hoarders of resources. Behind this result is the fact that a structural inequality (i.e., racial differences in social class) -- and not action-driven hoarding -- is the necessary condition for hoarding to emerge. Findings, therefore, illustrate that common action-driven understandings of opportunity hoarding can overlook the structural foundations behind this important phenomenon. Policy implications are discussed.