I kind of went a bit to wide with my response, if the focus is only on education and jobs then giving them to people who are under-qualified does set up a disadvantage.
In terms of getting into college, if you lower the bar for some people, you set them up to fail. I know some colleges will be more easy with grades depending on your color or gender but many aren't. So you send people to college that did not do great in high school and expect them to stick to a strict schedule and complete tasks on time. Many will give up and drop out, this is true for even students who come from wealthy families who buy their child's way into college/university.
As far as jobs go, it never sat right with me to hire someone over another person based on color or gender. These laws are meant to protect minorities and women from this but the way it is enforced is still the same thing. I mean, that to me is kind of racist and sexist. It should come down to working ability, skill, and education. If you want the job, you work your ass off to prove yourself. If I ran a business, I would hire the people I felt most suitable for the job. I would look at dependability, skill, education, and general personality (some jobs require certain personality traits). I mean, shouldn't that be how it is done?
I always say you can fight racism and sexism only so far before it becomes racism and sexism again and that is kind of where we are with a lot of things right now. What you have between your legs, the color of your skin, who you sleep with... none of this should matter but it does to a lot of people who say it shouldn't matter. It is confusing to me...
I get why the laws are in place but most folks these days, at least in my experience, don't think about gender or color unless it is brought up to them and most people certainly don't care who is sleeping with who. This was set up in an era where there were still a lot of older sexist and racist people who owned and ran companies and unfairly treated people. Because of backlash, you couldn't even do that today regardless of the laws in place. I think it needs to be updated according to where we are today as a society.