Colleges don’t need to be need-blind, in my opinion, to offer opportunities for low-income students. In fact, being need-blind might hinder their efforts to be inclusive, whereas being need-aware might help, depending on how they use it.
First of all, need-blind admissions policies don’t actually necessarily increase access to low-income kids. The assumption is that admissions officers don’t know your socioeconomic status because they’re not looking at your financial aid forms, but that’s poppycock. They can tell from other things. Higher-income students have access to all of the “holistic admissions criteria” boosting activities that lower-income students don’t. They go to the best high schools, which offer AP classes, honors classes, IB programs and rigorous courseloads. Their high schools have college counselors that have reasonable student to counselor ratios and that are experienced in helping students gain admission to top schools. Their parents went to elite colleges.
For example, only about 10% of the nation’s K-12 students attend private schools, and 80% of those schools are religious. However, if you look at the class profiles of top schools that disclose this information, private school kids (and particularly non-religious private schools, which tend to be the top-ranked ones) are overrepresented. 30% of Dartmouth’s class of 2020 comes from private schools, and only 13% of those schools are religious. 41% of Yale’s incoming class comes from private schools, but only 8% of them are religious schools. 40% of Princeton’s incoming class also comes from private schools, and only 14% are religious. A non-religious private school is a really good indicator of being at least upper-middle-class without even seeing the financial aid form. That’s not even counting high-ranked public schools in high-income neighborhoods. Admissions officers know what those high schools are.
Another thing is legacy status: applicants who are legacies have a really, really high chance of being from a higher-income home. Yale has almost the same percentage of legacy students (13%) as they have first-generation students (15%), when there are waaaaay more first-generation college students in the country than children of Yale graduates. There are more Yale and Princeton legacies in their incoming classes than there are African American or Latino students.
The end result? 40-50% of almost every elite university’s incoming class is full pay. And “full pay” at these schools usually is an income of $180,000 or more, so that means there’s an even larger proportion of families that are still making good money and just getting a bit of financial aid (maybe like $150K or more). Is that coincidental? Nah. They’re simply using other indicators of wealth. Or, more likely, the other indicators of wealth - the good private and public schools, the full IB programs, the ‘non-traditional’ sports like squash and lacrosse and crew, the national participation in things like debate and theater, the summer programs in foreign countries or at expensive universities - are exactly the kinds of things that win students admission to elite schools. They never even need to look at your financial aid form; it’s still obvious.
But think about it - if colleges were need-aware when they did admissions, they could decide to balance their class in ways that make it possible for them to support their neediest students with financial aid. If you’re going to admit students who are going to need full coverage of their cost of attendance, you also have to admit some students who can afford to pay the entire thing. (I know most elite schools actually have lots of streams of revenue - investments of their endowment, grants, contracts, et al. - but tuition is still a driver.)
They could also deliberately choose to admit some really low-income students who they know have lower test scores, fewer IB and AP classes, less participation in extracurriculars (either because they don’t exist at their school or because these students have to work), no summer programs, no volunteering in Guatamala - but who are otherwise obviously really good, strong, and resilient students who might succeed. If you’re need-blind, those students maybe just look like slackers. If you use the context of their socioeconomic status, you realize that they’re doing the best with what they have and would do the same thing at your elite school.
Honestly, I think most universities already do this anyway. It’s not a coincidence that elite schools consistently have classes that are 40-50% full-pay students.