Only a small ruling fraction combined higher education with real property

Evidence

Considering that barely 15 per cent of the population was in any sense literate by the time of decolonization, the failures of the system are obvious enough, and in some senses all of this literate segment of the population could be construed as some kind of ‘elite’, since even bare literacy did help in the long-term dynamics of social mobilities. In terms of decisive class privilege, however, which combined higher education with considerable property and/or income, the real ‘educated elite’ was a mere fraction of that L 5 per cent. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1170

Categorization

• XREF: Supplies the material class-structure data Ahmad insists discourse analysis obscures — directly serving the reader’s stated goal of prioritizing materialist critique.