Assets are easier to hide than income, not that I am saying doing such is ethical or legal.
Perhaps, but the behavior of the colleges with respect to cranking up tuition is not always ethical, either (you may recall a scandal in the 80s. Administrators from the elite colleges were meeting annually and were basically fixing prices at their institutions so that they all kept pace with each other). I suspect that this type of behavior is not isolated.
In a situation like this one, hiding assets strikes me as being a reasonable reaction. I knew someone whose family had to take out a second mortgage on their farm to pay for college.
