The privileged go to private school. Our programs are dominated by first generation immigrants, mostly SE Asian. Even the white component tends to be poor immigrant families.
If hard-working and intelligent poor people clawing their way upwards is a stain on equality, something has gone deeply deeply wrong with our conception of equality.
It’s always been a problem for NY liberals that these programs were so massively underrepresenting the black population. The fact that they were highly diverse had to be ignored. The fact that they were rife with poor first generation immigrants had to be ignored (it undercut the “rich people buy exam prep to get their kids in, which is why so few black kids get in” narrative). (The few black kids that did get in were almost /all/ first generation immigrants, too).
The only thing that mattered was the optics: not enough black kids, kill the program.