Good article on why net tuition (what students pay or borrow for college after grants and scholarships knock down the sticker price) has been declining for wealthier families and rising for lower income families. An excerpt:
…public and private colleges and universities are spending more of their financial-aid budgets trying to lure higher-income students, whose families earn much more than $30,000 a year, than on meeting the financial needs of low-income ones, according to a 2011 report from the U.S. Department of Education.
The colleges do this because dividing even a little money among several higher-income students means each of their families will pay the rest—filling more seats at a time when enrollments are declining, and keeping much-needed revenue coming in—while giving that same amount to a single low-income student would result in a loss to the bottom line.
Better-off students tend to come from better-funded high schools and also typically bring the kinds of entrance-test scores and grade-point averages that make colleges look better in those annual rankings than do students from poorer districts.
Read the whole thing.