I used to work at an insurance company, and I ran the internship program for my department once. When we were doing the interviews, one of the candidates was from my geographic area, which is pretty rural and not many of my coworkers were from anywhere near there. He’d launched a free tutoring program at his high school and carried it on a few hours a week through his first couple years of university until that point. For paid work experience, he had mostly agricultural work, because he had to support his family.
I’m realizing now that I may have been a little naïve about it, but no one else even wanted to consider him compared to the students who were able to do many more extracurricular activities and were able to dedicate more hours to non paid work.
What I’m trying to say is that even if nobody is actively corrupt, it’s a structurally classist system.