Heaven forbid they just lower tuition.

[sanantone]

While I feel that government-backed loans allow colleges to increase their tuition, remember that less people went to college before financial aid existed. Notice how the schools that don't participate in Title IV tend to be very small? A school has to be dirt cheap like Penn Foster or Ashworth to attract a lot of students. I haven't seen a regionally accredited, non-Title IV school that most poor and working class people can afford.

Do I think the high sticker prices at private universities deter people from applying? I don't know. The top schools always get thousands of applications. With poorer students, the problem is usually that their SAT or ACT scores aren't high enough to get in. SAT scores are correlated with family income and are worse at predicting college success than high school GPAs. If anything is keeping economically disadvantaged students out of private schools, it's the SAT.

On another forum, there is a discussion about how the top 10% rule (I think it's 7% now) in Texas lowers the ranking of UT Austin and Texas A&M. The problem is that rankings are partially based on the average SAT/ACT scores of students. While the GPAs of admitted UT and A&M students may be high, their average SAT/ACT scores are lower than one would expect for those schools. This is because the top 10% rule was designed to make it easier for poor and minority students to get into the top schools in Texas. The law puts the emphasis on class ranking and GPA rather than test scores. This was exactly their intention, and I think it's worthless to look at test scores when ranking a school.