This is an interesting question, but the situation that's being studied here is not the one that you describe. The "Moving to Opportunity" study upon which this

This is an interesting question, but the situation that's being studied here is not the one that you describe. The "Moving to Opportunity" study upon which this new research is based is primarily not concerned with children who "get into top colleges" or "make lots of money". In that study, the mean annual income of subjects is $11.7k and $14.3k at ages 24 and 28 respectively [0]. Fundamentally these interventions are concerned with making extremely poor people slightly less poor. The question you ask—are these opportunistic moves zero-sum?—is still an interesting one. But the realities of the sub-population studied here change the intuitive answer to that question. There may be a finite number of seats at Harvard, but there is plenty of capacity for upward mobility from lower classes into the middle class. [0] p864 here for income statistics https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_0416.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04...