But the Supreme Court in SFFA vs Harvard didn't touch this kind of affirmative action, so why are you even raising the point?

A key part of Harvard's defense was that they claimed they tried everything they could think of--thirteen different methods both suggested to them and which they came up with themselves--based on things like income and history of going to college and all that, and every single one failed to deliver the racial diversity they were aiming for without simultaneously having a substantially larger impact on academic quality than the status quo.

The University of California filed a brief in support of Harvard detailing how, over the 25 years after Proposition 209 stopped race-based affirmative action in California, the UC system had been unable to get their racial diversity numbers to where they wanted it either.

Nobody is saying inviting economically disadvantaged applicants with nominally lower credentials is a violation of Title VI. (Title VI, not IV.) The reason is that economic advantage is not a protected attribute. Harvard or UCLA (note: UCLA is the University of California campus closest to Inglewood) is fully empowered to note the differences between the opportunities at Inglewood and those at Beverly Hills High and consider Ingrid's application accordingly.

So your argument is rather harder than you've made it out to be. To make a moral case that isn't just true in general but also relevant to SFFA vs. Harvard, you have to make the case that this corrective justice is in fact morally corrective in that it is targeted to the harmed party.

If your moral good is measured at the level of racial identity groups, this is a pretty straightforward thing to do. However, since people feel things and racial identity groups don't (indeed, they aren't even a particularly well-defined concept), you kind of need to bring it back to the level of people. And that's more difficult, because any metric you use to say, "Hey, clearly this person has been harmed, so it would be corrective to give them a bit of a boost" also has the potential to be used by the university instead of using race. I'm not saying it couldn't be done--but that is your task, should you choose to take it on.

Furthermore, there is an unstated premise that getting into a school with more stringent selectivity is better than getting into one with less stringent selectivity. Suppose the opposite were true--then instead of having a corrective measure we would have an exacerbating one. The fact of the matter is really critical here to the moral case.

Oddly, despite a rather extensive search, I haven't been able to locate any information that documents whether this is true. It's a bit of a complicated question, because you have to frame the alternative properly. For instance, Ingrid's high school is a half-hour bike ride away from Los Angeles Southwest College, a two-year community college at which she could bolster her academic credentials beyond what Beverly could have done at Beverly Hills High. And Ingrid could certainly get in to LASC and transfer to UCLA if she excelled. Or she could go to Cal State Dominguez Hills, where she almost surely could get in if she were close enough to UCLA admission criteria for affirmative action to make the difference. Obviously in different places, you'd have different alternatives, and obviously these aren't all of the options that might be available to Ingrid: I'm just continuing your example to illustrate the question.

My hunch is that at least in some fields, the admission-to-more-reputable-school situation is the boost you assume it is. Students who go to Ivy League schools do have better employment prospects and higher income and so on--but because of the stringent selection, they already had better prospects when they came in, so there's still the question of how much if anything the school added beyond selecting the best. Without documentation, your argument must remain more tentative than you've phrased it.

(Note: you also have to do the evaluation for the typical person who isn't accepted who would have been had Ingrid not been admitted, to see if there's a harm to them which is more than offset (by some metric) than the good to the favored person. This is, of course, assuming a fixed number of slots; schemes that change the number of slots need to have that taken into account as well. And then you have a moral conundrum to face, too: generally it is not considered to be just to harm X to help Y, even if the harm to X is less than the help to Y, unless X willingly consents. So you also have to work through why that's cool in this case--the consequentialist argument is clear, but then you have to defend consequentialism as the appropriate moral framework to use here.)

(Edit: this examination of how income influences the chance of getting into top-tier schools is somewhat relevant, especially since they also tangentially address the question of whether there’s a benefit — mostly not, they think, unless you aim to end up in a top-1%-income-bracket: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/us-college-admissions-income/)

Anyway, I admire the attempt, but I don't think you managed to get far enough for the argument to be compelling!