Bostonian: As we've seen elsewhere, the percentage of scholarship money that's going to merit-based (generally associated with high SES) aid has been on a steep incline in order to game the US News rankings, at the expense of need-based aid.

The result being, rich kids who don't need help are capturing a growing percentage of that $33B in scholarship money, so this is somewhat bad journalism. Factor out sports scholarship money as well, and then let's see what portion is actually going to address the financial needs of academic students. My hunch says less than a third.

This cost factor does mean college is more expensive for the rich, who can afford it, and the middle class, who cannot. It doesn't address the overall inflationary insanity, though... just the distribution of suffering for it.

Overall, this is another solid argument for just making it free for all.