“There are so many resources wealthy can access. There are many resources low income families have access to. Middle class families doesn’t have access to or eligibility for either.”
What are you talking about. There are a ton of free resources available to almost everyone in this country (unless you’re somewhere very rural with very poor internet access and no public library). I was amazed at what you can find in the county library these days. And there is a ton of stuff online these days. Nothing like MIT’s OCR or even Wikipedia existed when I was a kid. My small town library was a one-room building and my jr high’s library was an small room annex to a classroom where the books look like they hadn’t been added to since the '50’s. But that didn’t stop me from reading “Brave New World” and “Brothers Karamazov” or from teaching myself algebra in 8th grade (the school system I was in didn’t offer algebra until HS at the time). Calculus, algebra, and geometry haven’t changed in centuries. The traditional Western Great Books curriculum hasn’t changed much either. There’s nothing stopping a kid from availing him/herself of free resources that are there for the taking.
“There wouldn’t be a need for fighting for certain colleges if all state schools did their job well.”
And how do you know that, for a motivated kid, there isn’t an in-state public where that is true? I daresay that at the vast majority of public flagships, there are way more resources and opportunities available than any one student can take advantage of.
Why do you presuppose that there is a “need”? What I see isn’t a “need” to fight for such schools, but a combination of obsession over status/prestige and insecurity manifesting itself. That too, would lead to the behavior that we currently see, rather than any real “need”.