Different states have different amounts of financial aid. I fortunately have a state school that is highly ranked in Comp. Sci.
My family didn't get much financial aid, but I managed to put mostly on a loan and pay it back afterwards. I do realize that having a family rich enough to disqualify from financial aid is the "advantage" this article is probably talking about...
But still, it wasn't like it was easy to take the SAT like 5 or 6 times through practice regiments. Memorizing word-lists from 3 different "SAT-word list books" to master analogies / reading sections was incredibly rigorous, it was the hardest studying I ever did in my life. By the end of the program, I memorized well over 20,000 "difficult words" over a period of 6-months to improve my SAT score (and promptly forgot about them after the test). Its not easy to do.
There were plenty of other people in my SAT Prep classes who were unable to score as high as me... and there were plenty of people I know who worked harder than I did and scored higher than I. So there is certainly something to be said about "self-driven effort".
But I fully recognize that my family's values and money helped me achieve what others couldn't. I also know of friends who were unable to afford multiple test-prep classes year after-year during high school... multiple years of "Kumon Math", and other such extracurricular after-school academic classes. Only now as an Adult do I realize how expensive all those after-school test prep classes are.
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There's give and take for sure. The opportunity is money-driven, but the achievement is still personal. All the money and test-prep classes in the world won't help if the child is disinterested or lazy.