It's quite true that the didn't completely earn their high status!

We should take the next step and replace the qualification with a quantification: how big of a boost did they get? (And: at what cost to the people who were un-boosted?)

Hint: when population sizes are markedly unequal, you pretty much always come up with the answer, "Not much of a boost; they really did earn most of their high status at least in comparison to correcting for race" but often also "that little boost was achieved at horrible cost".