Why are adult children of well off parents expected to get support from their parents. Mine had means but from a philosophical point of view cut me off, hard, on my 18th birthday.
Indeed. Just because one's parents have means doesn't mean that the children will have access to the means. And if their parents say no, they get screwed over based on something they have no control over and have no alternative to base it on their own income.
Plus, this is completely contrary to the way K-12 works. Anyone can attend public K-12 schools regardless of their income level. Granted, most such parents choose to send their kids to a private or charter school, but nonetheless the option is there and I don't see why this should be any different for post-secondary.
Finally, the most significant factor is that the higher the income brackets we're talking about here, the fewer and fewer people fall into them. Thus, even if allowed, it shouldn't be a big deal, because that's just tacking on a relatively small group of people to begin with before even factoring in that within that small group many wouldn't choose to take advantage of it or just send their kids to some out-of-state school instead, similar to K-12 public schools.
That is, it's a lot of bother over a relatively small number of people to begin with and creating a system set-up to exclude them despite their small number just makes everything more complicated for little gain and pushes out people who really could have used the help, such as families that have exorbitant medical bills or their own student loan debt or what-have-you that makes their net income an incredibly misleading figure as to how much discretionary income they really have. Ignoring such cases and making a complicated system that pushes away people that really could use the help just to give the middle finger to a relatively small number of rich people to begin with, especially when our K-12 public schools don't work that way and the world isn't falling down (not for that reason anyway), just doesn't seem worth it to me. Kicking out the 1% just doesn't seem worth it because of who you'd be kicking out along with them.
Of course, I get very well why that idea is a much tougher sell. However, despite their being numerous problems with the way our public K-12 schools are currently set up and funded like funding coming from property values leading to severe disparity in school quality, them being open to anyone regardless of their income is not one of them, so I don't personally see the problem with applying the same standard to colleges as well.
