“Why don’t the college deduct $40k tuition from the price tag if they claim that on average, a student get around $40k financial aid (no loan). The price tag is a game.”
I think that there are a few reasons. One is that some students can’t afford “full price minus $40k”, and they want to give every academically strong student the chance to attend university. Whether it is fair or not I don’t know, but this does mean that parents earning $260,000 per year get to pay quite a bit more for the same education compared to the average student. I suppose that if everything were priced this way there might be no point in making $260,000 per year.
“If your kid is an A student as your name implies and has high test scores, there will be cheaper options.”
There are indeed many academically and otherwise very good less expensive options. There are great schools with very strong professors and beautiful campuses that your child can attend for less than half of the full price at Yale. They will get a great education, and end up with a degree that doesn’t say “Yale” on it. If you don’t want to pay $65,000 or $70,000 per year then you don’t need to. This might mean that your child doesn’t go to Yale.
My own opinion is that even if we can afford $70,000 per year, we would need to be very convinced that there was a good reason to pay that much before I would want to shell it out. For undergrad I am not convinced. Other people clearly have other opinions.