It is detrimental to an individual to have disabilities that prevent going to college. Those people will statistically earn less than, for lack of a better word, normal people. And normal people will earn less than the outliers on the other end of the spectrum. If you have the capability of graduating with top honours from Stanford, there is no benefit to actually doing it. It is beneficial to be born as the kind of person who can achieve that goal.

There is no arms race, simply a misunderstanding of the data around the filtering that takes place with increasing levels of academic rigour. Those who fall down to that rigour also fall down to the rigours of the working world, statistically.