"merit" as measured by something like an SAT score has pretty obvious ties to factors that are controlled by or at least correlated with family wealth, such as

"merit" as measured by something like an SAT score has pretty obvious ties to factors that are controlled by or at least correlated with family wealth, such as informal and formal extracurricular instruction, how much your parents read to you, which registers of English you are exposed to as a child (affecting, at least, vocabulary), whether you have a safe and quiet space in which to study, whether you need to work as a teen to support your family, whether you ever went hungry (yes, this happens, and in astonishing rates even in America), etc., etc. Even the kind of English you speak can cause educational issues if it differs enough from the variety that is used in schools[1]: "[L]anguage variation may increase the cognitive load on students who speak AAE and thereby affect their understanding of and the speed with which they work through STEM texts. They examined the relationship between the linguistic complexity of math word problems and success in carrying out the computation for 75 African American second graders. They found a statistically significant effect for possessive –s (e.g., ‘my mama house’ vs. ‘my mama’s house’) and 3rd singular –s (‘He eat a lot’ vs. ‘He eats a lot’) on the students’ math performance: for students who were highly affected by linguistic differences, about 15% of them would have answered 94 more questions correctly (about 9% of the total) if these linguistic features had been removed. Terry et al. suggest that some AAE-speaking students face an added cognitive load on their working memory when they read and process math word problems, due to language variation – and time spent ‘translating’ while taking standardized tests is time lost." [1]: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/lnc3.12060 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/lnc3.12060