> The smart person who is born poor or a minority will do just fine as their grades will carry them.

Spoken exactly like someone who was not poor and not a minority.

Being poor creates a network effect of issues that can keep VERY smart kids down for a long time. Being poor and having all of your relatives be poor too means you have no mentor network and very few ways out. Being poor with poor parents that are working three jobs just to afford food and shelter or aren’t working because they’ve given up (or were given up on) means that your most direct line of support is pretty much absent and that you are on your own. Very few kids make it out of this situation.

It is a very hard problem to fix.

If you WERE poor and a minority and are saying this, then you should DEFINITELY know that you were an aberration.

I agree. However college will not fix the problems those people face.

I don’t think that banks should solely be in charge of who gets a chance in this country. Furthermore the myth of the good grades regardless of home life is just not realistic in my experience- many people need to grow into adulthood later because of instability, malnutrition, or the ability of the school they went to to prepare them for standardized testing.

I agree with all the objections you place. However those are different problems. Putting somebody in college from that situation will not help them. We need to give them a way better, admitting they will never be well educated, but they can bring their children to that level with the right support.

Note, this comment applies to the other poster as well.