In response, many schools have increased their "sticker prices" -- the tuition they advertise to the public -- while offering many students discounts through financial aid packages. Affluent undergraduates pay the full cost of their educations, while lower-income students receive aid and pay a much lower final net price. This is called the "high-tuition, high-aid model," and it is essentially a means-tested program. Some higher ed experts have praised this shift, arguing that it would help low-income students by decreasing their tuition.

Unfortunately, this argument has not held up in practice.

Reality: High Tuition + High Aid = Higher Prices for All

As more schools have adopted the high-tuition, high-aid model, prices have gone up for low-income and high-income students alike. The reason is simple: Tuition is going up faster than aid. In the end, low-income students -- as well as middle- and upper-income students -- face much better prices at schools that keep total price low across the board. As Edward St. John and Douglas Priest wrote a few years ago in Inside Higher Ed, "The reality of high-tution/high-aid did not match the vision advocated by progressives."

At Penn State, which uses the high-tuition, high-aid model, the sticker price for tuition at the school's flagship campus was $15,250 for the 2010-2011 school year, the most recent year for which all data is available. Including room and board and other expenses and subtracting financial aid, public college students from Pennsylvania families making less than $30,000 a year faced a bill of almost $17,000 per year. Families had to pay more than half of their yearly income to send one child to school. That's after factoring in financial aid from any source, including the maximum federal Pell Grant awarded to the student.

A few hundred miles south in North Carolina, students at the main Chapel Hill campus of low-sticker-price UNC faced tuition of around $6,700 for the same year, less than half of what Penn State charged. With all additional costs and aid factored in, UNC students from families making less than $30,000 paid only $4,000 in final net price.

Penn State and UNC have the same share of students with Pell Grants, meaning that they have a similar percentage of low-income students. But despite having a much higher sticker price, PSU actually offers less aid to students than UNC. Only 29 percent of Penn State students receive scholarships or grant aid from the school, while nearly half of UNC students do - and the average amount of aid is smaller at Penn State. Thus, the much larger gap for students at Penn State is not nearly covered.

The model is not high-tuition, high-aid. It's just high-tuition.

To test whether these examples are accurate more broadly, I analyzed data from the largest public four-year colleges and universities from the National Center for Education Statistics. The aggregated data indeed show that, while there are exceptions, schools with higher sticker prices tend to have higher net prices for the lowest-income students.