You will hear lots of stories by draft dodgers, to color their actions in a better light than they actually existed in.

Bottom line, many/most of the deferments were to those connected to a politician, in one way or another. Guys on the draft board had an inordinate amount of say in who got the deferments. Know of one guy that was drafted at the same time as I was. His mother was widowed and he was the only son. No deferment for him. My FIL was the son of an ex-county comissioner. He spent WWII working on a farm and chuckling about how the farmers always had a barrel of gas and good tires for their outfits, while others suffered through rationing.

My wife's grandfather and great-uncle were homesteaders during WWI. The local draft board told them one of them would be drafted and it was up to the brothers to figure out which would go. They settled it with a game of cribbage -- loser went off to war. He made sure that his only son sat out the next war.