I grew up in a poor, dangerous neighborhood as a child. Later in my teens I lived in a wealthy suburb with collectible cars in the driveway after my father's startup succeeded.

My father was physically abusive, and child services got involved. My father's lawyers sorted things out to get the investigation to stop and drop charges if I lived somewhere else. I unfortunately went into the Troubled Teen industry (which I had definitively no reason to be in other than as part of his lawyers' story blaming me for what happened). That industry is filled with abuse.

The day I turned 18 I was pulled from there and struggled with homelessness for a year. It was extremely hard to succeed when you are homeless.

Financial aid for university is tied to your childhood guardian's social security number until you are 25, so I was a homeless person, and not eligible for any financial aid.

This is just a start. I've never broken any laws or done anything particularly wrong.

Did you ever think of my story? Apparently bureaucrats didn't.

Also, why should I need permission from some bureaucrats to study from the top degree programs? Shouldn't the goal be the opposite: to expand the best education opportunities to as many people as possible?

We have so much wealth and enormous social spending in America, and yet look at our outcomes with homelessness, poverty and suicide...

The adversity score, as far as I can see, gives high scores to students who succeed in worse school districts. While none of the sites reporting on this bothered to link to any kind of official announcement, it looks like this may be a refinement of the tool announced here in 2016: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr...

From the college board's description of the tool, it weights applicant scores by the quality of their neighborhood and high school. So a disadvantaged student whose family focused on moving to a neighborhood/school where lots of students succeed is not given a high score in this analysis.

The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.

They are imperfect phrases, but generally an equality of opportunity in this case refers to no matter what you look like, what your parents do, how much money you have, if you get a SAT score and GPA above a threshold, you get accepted into the school.

Whereas equality of outcome would focus more on who gets in even if it means treating people differently based on what they look look, how much money they have, where they live, etc.

Because it's an attempt to change the outcomes of the test to make them more equal than they would be otherwise.

They are using neighborhood income level and status to adjust the outcome of the SAT.