Speaking as a one-time rural white kid, ivy league grad, and now alumni interviewer who was interviewed kids in both rich suburbs (palo alto) and poor rural nor

Speaking as a one-time rural white kid, ivy league grad, and now alumni interviewer who was interviewed kids in both rich suburbs (palo alto) and poor rural northern new hampshire and vermont: neither one of the kids you described is getting in. What matters isn’t what you do; it's what you do with the opportunities that are available to you. Your hypothetical rich kid didn’t do anything more than what was put in front of her. Your hypothetical poor kid didn’t try to find ways to challenge himself either. The rich kids from Palo Alto who got in were the ones who weren’t loading up on AP classes, they were the ones who had gone across the road to Stanford and kept walking into bio labs until they found one that would let them do grunt work. The poor kids in rural New England who get in go down to the library or online and teach themselves grammar, then go on to learn a couple years worth of college-level linguistics and philosophy of language (which even rich kids don’t get to take in high school) because the books were there and they were interesting. I wouldn’t pretend for a moment that the deck isn’t stacked. But it’s not stacked in this particular manner.