I'll give you an example from my own life. My dream schools were Duke and MIT. I applied to Duke, but didn't even apply to MIT. Want to know why? Because it cost $40 to apply. Every school charged an application fee, so I had to be incredibly picky about where I applied to stretch the money from my $5.50 / hr part-time job at Chik-Fil-A. I had to narrow my list to 4, and I figured MIT was a long-shot so it didn't make the cut (Wofford, Furman, Duke, College of Charleston; got into all but Duke).

It wasn't until years later that I found out all you have to do is call up the admissions office and they'll waive the fee. You can't imagine how gutted I felt when I learned this. I wanted to cry. I was doing pretty good by then but my mind was filled with the alternate histories that were within reach without me even knowing it.

Somebody is probably reading this and thinking I wasn't poor, I was just stupid. Maybe so, but it's really hard to put yourself in the position of someone who has no resources, no perspective, and no people in their life to guide them through basic things like this (my parents didn't go to college). Sometimes being blessed with a good brain just isn't enough.

The tuition cost is $53,450, with housing costing $10,430 and to my understanding living there is required the first year.

Factor in books and food, and you're looking at $60,000-70,000/yr.

That's $240,000-280,000 for a four year degree.

I dropped out of highschool at 16, got my GED (thinking I'd be able to get a 2-year headstart on my degree without researching the cost of college), and enrolled in community college where it cost me $800 to take a single class.

Making $8/hr working in a lumber mill fulltime on top of trying to go to school, that just wasn't going to work out. After taxes my income was about $1,000/mo and I was living on my own and supporting myself, so all told I could manage to save about $200-300/mo.

It took me a third of a year to save up enough to pay for one community college class -- or I could go into crippling debt as someone who wasn't even legally an adult yet.

I eventually wound up quitting and giving up on the idea of ever obtaining a college education.

Real fantastic options, our education system and opportunity equality in the USA is just swell.

It “felt” more uncommon that someone actually turns down an MIT offer after they see the package, as they do their best to provide student work aid and students tend to be optimists about debt - but I only saw the people who said yes, so my data is totally biased. I’ll note that one common situation is folks who can technically “afford” MIT, but are offered a full ride elsewhere - a lot of folks I knew who joined felt some pressure to save money by taking the scholarship elsewhere, and struggled to turn it down.

I have heard MIT has slightly less complete need-based financial aid than some of the other big name private schools, but still much better than most before-aid cheaper schools, so probably some but relatively few of the people who would otherwise go to MIT, and those few are probably going to other big name private schools, not excluded from education.

There's probably a lot more not applying because they think they wouldn't be able to afford it, because knowledge of the sticker price of big name colleges seems far more widespread than knowledge of the amount of school-based need-based aid they tend to have available.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/long-brewi...

Our prestigious higher education institutions have become hedge funds with small educational arms. Over the last decades billions of dollars has been transferred from middle class households to the hedge funds of these universities. If their goal was to maximize education they wouldn't artificially limit admissions so as to increase the rarity of their luxury brand.