barriers that prevent people from entering the middle class are the defining feature of the middle class, according to one way of thinking about class. While members of the middle class acquire education and skills, for instance, we exclude others from acquiring education and skills. Opportunity hoarding is the term for this, and it takes the form of admissions procedures, testing, tuition costs, licensing, ranking, and all sorts of credentialing. Conveniently, we don’t tend to think of these barriers as a means of protecting our class status, but as necessary measures to gauge intelligence or
...more
