keep in mind there are two kinds of scholarships, merit is still an option regardless of income. then someone else would be subsidizing your kid!
Yes, and there’s even a name for it:
"High Tuition/ “High Aid” model
To reduce reliance on OOS students, College of William & Mary boosted tuituon prices for instate students. Now the instate fullpays not only pay more for themselves, they also pay for other students.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/22/william-mary-adopts-new-financing-model-embraces-high-tuitionhigh-aid
It works as long as a school can find enough suckers.
And the result is popular private colleges have student bodies increasingly made up of the rich and the poor/lower middle class, and relatively few students from the middle and upper/middle class. Perhaps this is one reason there has been so much dissension lately at popular private colleges like Yale.
And ED just makes it worse: only rich fullpays and poor fullrides can really take advantage of it.