I’ll give a short anecdote that might sway your opinion. I grew up poor in Baltimore City. I directly benefitted from the CTY program, where I was able to take accelerated math courses over the summer. My family didn’t pay a dime of the $3k+ per summer cost to attend. After several summers of CTY, I was able to take AP Calculus as a freshman in high school. I would not be who I am today without CTY.

I agree, that article written by the director of CTY is biased. And most who attended were rich kids, so maybe in aggregate their approach doesn’t make a difference. But it made a difference for me. CTY provided opportunities for me I never would have had otherwise.

I definitely noticed class differences in CTY my first time - there were kids who seemed like CTY was normal but for myself, I was blown away and felt like I was in another world. Eventually I realized these kids were also ones who traveled internationally a lot, or did science fair competitions regularly, played multiple musical instruments, were learning different languages like chinese and french, were legacy kids for ivy league parents, etc. Meanwhile I was the kid who was good at basketball and soccer during breaks because everyone else was a nerd.