@MrUselessCake There is a sort of donut hole of sorts with regard to college affordability. Some families qualify for aid, some can afford to pay in full on their own fairly comfortably, and then there is the group that can neither get need-based aid but cannot self-finance at an institution like Brown.
But we have to be clear about what we mean by middle class in this context. Any member of the “true” middle class will be eligible for generous need-based financial aid. ! I just pulled up an online calculator - there are different ones that produce marginally different results - to calculate where a specific family income falls in the US family income distribution. For example, a total family income of $120,000 puts one at around the 75th percentile. That income will still qualify most families for considerable financial aid at schools like Brown that commit to covering “need.” Yet, that family is not low income and really couldn’t be called “middle class” unless one adds the descriptor “upper middle class,” because that family has an income that exceeds 75% of families in the United States. Of course, this is little solace to those equally deserving high school seniors whose family incomes put them in the donut hole.
I should add that Brown also considers the CSS Profile that includes lots of information, like housing wealth, which can make some families “look” more wealthy than they may feel because they live in parts of the country with super expensive housing and they’ve owned their homes for long enough to have paid off a good chunk of the mortgage.
The biggest concern, to me, is the conundrum of how to deal with college savings accounts. As it stands now, those families who do not save anything for college are rewarded by greater financial aid eligibility. I have a friend whose kids attended expensive private universities and they were full-pay at all of them because the family had saved a ton for college by being very frugal for years. She said that she told her kids that they were the poorest full pay kids at those schools!