· 5 min read · worthmydegree.com
Too rich for aid, too poor for sticker
There is a sentence that shows up under every article about college costs: too rich for financial aid, too poor to afford college. It describes a real place on the income ladder, and if your household earns somewhere between $150,000 and $300,000, you probably live there. This guide puts numbers on that place, because the arguments about it almost never contain any.
Figures computed by this site's own tools are rounded to the nearest thousand dollars; Yale's figures further down are quoted as published.
The number that decides everything
Federal need-based aid starts from one number: the Student Aid Index, what the FAFSA's worksheet says your family can pay per year. A school's need-based aid is roughly its cost minus your SAI, so once your SAI passes a school's whole cost of attendance, need-based aid there is zero. Here is the ladder for a two-parent family of four with one child in college and no savings counted, computed by this site's SAI tool from the 2027-28 federal worksheet:
| Family income | The formula expects, per year |
|---|---|
| $100,000 | ~$8,000 |
| $150,000 | ~$25,000 |
| $200,000 | ~$42,000 |
| $250,000 | ~$58,000 |
| $300,000 | ~$74,000 |
Two facts make that table heavier than it looks. First, it is per child: since the 2024-25 FAFSA, the formula no longer divides the parent contribution between siblings enrolled at the same time, so two children in college at once means the number twice. Second, savings only raise it. This award year protects no assets at all, so $150,000 in savings lifts the $250,000 row from about $58,000 to about $67,000.
For scale: the median public university's in-state cost of attendance is about $18,000 a year and the median private nonprofit's about $45,000. A $150,000 family's $25,000 already covers the whole median public. A $250,000 family's $58,000 covers the median private with room to spare. That is the entire too-rich-for-aid mechanic, and the infographic version shows it in one picture, with a California edition against CSU and UC prices.
The famous schools break the pattern, in your favor
The most selective schools run their own aid math, and the last two years moved it substantially. Here is what each one publishes, each with typical-assets fine print worth reading on the school's own aid page:
| School | Published commitment |
|---|---|
| Harvard | Tuition free under $200,000; everything free under $100,000 |
| Princeton | Full cost covered for most families under $150,000; tuition free up to $250,000 |
| Penn | Tuition covered by grants and work-study under $200,000 |
| Yale | Typical family pays ~$10,000 at $150,000 income; ~$20,000 at $200,000; ~$43,000 at $250,000 |
| Columbia | Tuition free under $150,000 |
| Brown | Tuition free under $125,000 |
| Dartmouth | Tuition free under $125,000 |
| Cornell | Families under $75,000 typically pay nothing toward tuition |
| MIT | Tuition free under $200,000; everything free under $100,000 |
| Stanford | Tuition free under $150,000; no parent contribution under $100,000 |
| UChicago | Tuition free under $250,000 from fall 2027; housing and meals too under $125,000 |
None of the eleven expects loans in its aid packages. Now compare the $200,000 rows against the government's: the federal formula expects $42,000 from that family, Harvard and Penn charge it no tuition at all, and Yale's own math asks about $20,000. The wealthiest privates use their endowments to charge less than the federal line, sometimes by half or better.
The catch is that this generosity lives at a few dozen heavily endowed schools that admit almost nobody. Roughly 250 mostly private colleges collect the CSS Profile and run their own formula on top of the federal one, and that formula can count what the FAFSA ignores: home equity, a business, the other parent in a divorce. At those schools the federal number is a floor, not an estimate. The squeeze is real, but it lives in the middle: private colleges with real sticker prices and ordinary endowments, where the discount is small and the list price is not.
Where the federal money runs out
The other half of the squeeze is borrowing. Since July 1, 2026, Parent PLUS is capped at $20,000 a year and $65,000 total per student, and the gap can simply run out. Add the student's own federal limit and the most a family can borrow from the government for one bachelor's degree is $92,000. Of the 5,035 colleges in this site's cost dataset, 2,809 charge more than that over four years at their in-state price. Above the line, the choices are cash, private credit, or a different school; the aid office is no longer part of the conversation.
What to do from your rung
Get your own number first. The table above is one household shape. The SAI tool runs the actual federal worksheet on your income, your household size, and your assets, line by line, and tells you what the CSS Profile schools will see differently.
Then price the whole plan, not the aid. Aid decides what a year costs; it does not decide whether the degree pays that cost back. The calculator takes the school, the major, the loan that falls out of your number, and measures the result against not going at all: when you come out ahead, and by how much.
Work the levers the formula ignores. The formula does not care where the degree starts, but the price does: two community college years cut the bill dramatically without touching the credential. And a strong in-state public at $18,000 to $40,000 a year is the price range where an upper-middle-class SAI stops being a wall and starts being a checkbook.
The feeling behind the complaint is legitimate: a $250,000 family writing $58,000 checks per child does not feel rich while doing it. But the way out is not an argument about the formula. It is knowing your number before the schools tell you theirs, and putting it into arithmetic that includes the years after graduation, not just the four in the middle.