“If your family isn’t well-off or you didn’t work hard enough in high school to get any scholarships, college isn’t for you” is certainly an interesting take, and it seems like a much too simplistic heuristic.
I paid for school (admittedly not that much, I stayed in state and lived in relatively poor accommodations). I’m also the only one of my siblings to not be a felon or dead before 45. Life is often a game of deltas: given the same or similar starting conditions, where did you wind up?
If you keep making delta positive outcomes, eventually you’ll wind up somewhere interesting.
I cannot think of a single person in my extended family across three generations for whom that heuristic is true. I don’t doubt that it applies in some situations. I can’t tell you what the actual ROI is; but “belonging there” seems a little encumbered by assumptions about the diversity of ways and timings in which young people develop academically and emotionally.