Having to pay for tutors to have a chance of getting into the best colleges biases the whole system in favour of the wealthy.

Do you want only rich kids going to college?

If you are genuinely smart you will do well enough on qualify for top schools just by studying at school and on your own and relying on your own ability. And even the best and most expensive tutors cannot do that much to improve your scores if you just don't have the aptitude and discipline.

The system now is far more geared towards sending only rich kids to college than any national testing and admissions system would be.

That is not how it works. People having tutors are genuinely smart, have discipline, do well and then get tutor to do even better.

How do kids end up "genuinely smart" or "have discipline"?

If your parents are rich and have are around and can provide excellent schools, nutrition, love and care, pay for extra-curricular activities etc, you are far more likely to end up being "smart" and "have discipline" than someone who grows up in a family where parents are absent, they have to go to an inner city school, they can't afford school trips, instruments, extra-curricular activities, since they have to have a part time job themselves to make ends meet.

My point is, that SO many of the qualities we think that somehow kids got "innately" are actually purely products of luck and circumstance. The ability to "work hard" isn't a gift some are born with and some are born without, it's learned and modeled from our lives, parents, teachers, experiences etc.

If you never have parents that buy you books and encourage you to read, it's doubtful you will end up being "smart"

Plenty of poor kids are genuinely smart and have discipline too.

My point was, people love to imagine world where smart and discipline is mutually exclusive with "parents paying tutor" or other rich person perk. ImAnd if parents pay those, kid must be lazy or stupid.

It is not so. Even super entitled kid can be smart and work hard. If rich entitlement is just another advantage and so is tutor. Poor kids can be as smart as hardworking too, just without additional advantages.

Plsu, some people are not smart or hard working due to genetics. And damm they can be rich too.

You should read "The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael Sandel (Harvard Professor), this problem is well studied at this point. The books point is that America has the idea that it's a meritocracy and the kids that end up succeeding got their out of merit and their inherent talents, but in fact it's actually a delusion, America doesn't have a meritocracy at all, and in fact success is mostly to do with money and influence based on your family background. And this is all based on actual data presented in the book.

Sure, there are poor kids from bad backgrounds who, against all odds, end up doing well. But these are outliers. In general, coming from rich families who throw money into your education, tutors, therapy, extra-curricular activities etc, is a MASSIVE advantage, and as such, one of the highest predictors of ending up at a prestigious college and high paying job is how wealthy your parents are...

There's a diminishing return on the value invested in tutoring where innate ability plays a bigger part.

I've witnessed this first hand via a friend of the family. Their kid didn't have the grades or entrance exam test scores to study what they wanted at university. So the kid got to take a year off after high school and focus entirely on studying for the entrance exams with regular tutoring from various private tutors. And while their test scores absolutely did improve quite a bit by doing this, they didn't improve enough, and they still ended up having to study at a secondary choice anyway.

That argument has nothing to do with whether it is gaming the system. Just like intentionally buying a house on a good school district is not gaming the system.