I'd say it's consistent with that hypothesis, but not that it corroborates it. An alternative hypothesis is that the Bay Area draws in smart folks (who are then wealthy, because Bay Area salaries are outrageous), and smart folks have smart kids. In other words, while wealth is correlated with higher SAT scores it doesn't "beget" them.

To tease that apart you'd need a counterfactual universe where those same Bay Area people weren't wealthy but still had kids. So, uh, good luck finding that...

One datapoint that at least gestures in "correlates" but doesn't "beget" is that half of the students at Stuyvesant High School, the most prestigious math/science school in New York with an admission based on a test akin to the SAT, are economically disadvantaged[0]. If wealth truly "begot" high scores on these tests, you'd probably not see that.

(It also demonstrates that Stuyvesant does a great job making the test accessible: there's free study materials, test times on weekdays and weekends, free shuttles to test site, etc. I wish that was the takeaway here with the SAT discussion: help low income folks prep for and take the test, don't eliminate the test altogether.)

[0] https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2018&instid=80000...

I guess the way I saw it was that the wealth itself begets high SAT scores (through the channel of paying for a good education, which would be invested in regardless of SAT requirements). Removing SAT requirements doesn’t help most wealthy students because they were likely going to do well on the SAT anyway, if anything it hurts them as it’s one advantage they have over others that wouldn’t be considered.