The trend toward adversity points for college admissions is another way to increase the advantage of upper-middle-class white kids rather than reduce it, exactly as subbing in interviews for standardised tests did a generation ago. Those kids speak the dialect of the college admissions office staff at a completely natural level. They can write a better adversity essay, hitting all the right notes, better than kids who have faced actual adversity, who sometimes slip up on that. My elder son from the Romanian orphanage, who was sent into the fields to herd sheep and goats at age six so his father could have cigars and palinca, and was later dropped off at Casa de Copii, the mouth of hell that you saw 60-Minutes specials on, only charmed a small religious college in South Carolina with his bio, and they seemed to forget it the day he arrived. Probably just as well. We kept him out of Special Ed and ESL in high school and he gradually figured it out.
He didn't write an essay. He told them the story, sometimes laughing, when he went down to see them.
If you are trying to uncover a Black kid from inner-city Baltimore who is a diamond in the rough, an essay may not be your best bet. That will give you six middle-class kids from Bethesda and three second-generation Nigerians. A standardised test sorted by ZIP code will do better.
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