I'm experiencing this first hand. My family immigrated here from Bangladesh. Unlike much of my family, my dad had a college-degree required job lined up, and we ended up pretty comfortable with him on a GS-scale job and my mom selling furniture. Thanks to the SATs, my brother and I both ended up breaking into industries (banking, law) that until relatively recently were good old boy's clubs.
Now that I have kids at in private school, I have a totally different perception of the cultural capital these families have that we didn't. We have a second winter break for ski holiday. My daughter asked me why we don't ever go to Aspen. When we were kids, we didn't know anyone, we didn't know what to write in admissions essays. We had enough money to do test prep, but that's incredibly cheap in comparison. I'm not concerned about my kids if we move to a subjective admissions system. We'll send my daughter to Bangladesh to do some gold-star project and hire an admissions coach to wring my dad's story of growing up in a third world village for all its worth. But if I was a recent immigrant, or a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.
Now that I have kids at in private school, I have a totally different perception of the cultural capital these families have that we didn't. We have a second winter break for ski holiday. My daughter asked me why we don't ever go to Aspen. When we were kids, we didn't know anyone, we didn't know what to write in admissions essays. We had enough money to do test prep, but that's incredibly cheap in comparison. I'm not concerned about my kids if we move to a subjective admissions system. We'll send my daughter to Bangladesh to do some gold-star project and hire an admissions coach to wring my dad's story of growing up in a third world village for all its worth. But if I was a recent immigrant, or a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.