For one , you don't need to go straight to college , or attend college at all. Even before I got my BA I was making more than the Ivy League Alum in my family.

For one , you don't need to go straight to college , or attend college at all. Even before I got my BA I was making more than the Ivy League Alum in my family. That's the first myth. California has what's probably the best community college system in America. It was very easy for me, as a poor kid to meet ( and at times date) people from all over the world. Maybe you dropped out of high school due to just not liking it. You can still attend a community college, transfer to a UC and have a great career. I did very poorly in highschool since I was constantly ether getting kicked out or evicted. Still I had morons in my family pressuring me to shrug it off. If anything I'm angrier now than I was back then I was exceptionally lucky to be able to find an affordable place to live at 19. My family is pretty horrible, all I really needed was a stable place. But that's impossible now, the same apartment that used to be $600 is now $1,300 or 1400. For the record I've had several Asian friends who come from similar backgrounds, where there's extreme domestic violence at home and they just need a stable place to live. This is very much not a race issue, it's a 'people who don't have stable households aren't going to be able to get into top schools' issue. If you want to fix test scores or whatever, you need to look at actually fixing the economic situation many of these kids are in. Make it possible to afford your own place with a full time minimum wage job. At least then when a kid from a messed up family turns 18 they can move out.