You go to a better school, you get a better education, you are more educated and you get a 34 on the ACT.
If you go to a crappy school and you get the same score than there's no qualitative difference between the schools and your parents skipped vacations for nothing.
But obviously the OP must believe there was value in the better school otherwise they wouldn't mention it. So they would believe they would have got a lower score in a different school, and if that's a proxy for education, then the OP must have ended up with a better education, and is also much more likely to succeed at _any_ college they go to, even if it's not Harvard.
I don't get you, batbomb. But that's OK sometimes.
Somehow, all of that is rendered worthless when somebody going to a shitty school with shitty food wins the shitty school and home life lottery and edges them out of the more prestigious school with lower test scores thanks to the adversity bump.
Ultimately, good school kid must settle for highly regarded state school and post about how unfair the system is on a website for engineers and entrepreneurs. Shitty school kid becomes rich and famous because they went to an Ivy, everybody in the VC office loves them, buys a Tesla and their single mom a mansion.
Just kidding, shitty school kid had to drop out when their mom got sick junior year.
That's assuming they calculated their adjustments precisely. And if they didn't, then welcome to all sorts of artificial biases in the system where a few more people appointed themselves to determine the fates of many. Congrats on solving nothing at all.
For example, if Alice is raised by two loving parents in a so-so neighborhood she gets a score of 50. If Bob was abused as a child, put into foster care at 10, and adopted into a good neighborhood at 14 he gets a score of 25. Due to Bob's past he is way behind in school but works hard. Bob and Alice both end up getting 1400. At a selective school its possible that because Bob his a lower adversity score his application automatically gets rejected while Alice's application gets looked at and accepted.
This is the kind of case that is possible with an "Adversity Score" that bothers me.
I'm all about parents sacrificing for their kids, but when the system is set up to push people that far something about the system is broken.
However, there is another component to it: one's advantage is always relative to others' lack of advantage. This is why equal access education will never be truly supported (no matter what people say); if all kids have the same advantage as their kids, then their kids don't actually have any advantage at all (in social terms).