When I was applying to college, there was a policy at the time that if your grades were meritorious, you would be automatically accepted to the local state university (a world-prestigious system).

I like to believe I benefitted from this program because while my grades were excellent, my test scores well-above average, and my extracurriculars strong and personal, I was in a chaotic home situation where my desires about what I wanted to do with my life were undermined by my (undereducated and lower class) parents. Consequently, my admissions essay made no sense with my declared major and I'm pretty sure that barred me from the really good schools.

I did not have the life skills to "pull myself" up from my bootstraps and forge my own path. If that program did not exist, I could've very well ended up living under my parents' roof while struggling to "figure it out" in community college while working retail jobs. Instead I ended up living under my parents' roof while hard-committing to the advice of teachers to get "any" degree in four years from this world-class prestigious university while working retail jobs. Miraculously, I ended up studying exactly what I wanted to study and it still complements my day-to-day life.

If I'd gone with that first route, there's a high possibility that my chaotic home life would've thwarted my ability to actually earn a degree, or I would've been pushed into making greater and greater compromises about what and where to study. People who unilaterally complain about DEI programs have little appreciation for how much a home life (and wider context) can undermine and disturb a young person's potential. That program I likely benefitted from was dismantled years ago. Was it wrong for me to go to that university? Did I take the spot of someone who had "worked harder" for it?