I feel somewhat ambivalent about this. I'm glad that Brown wants to eliminate student debt, and I'm glad that low income students at ivies often pay no tuition. However, this doesn't change their essential model, which is to enroll a very small number of undergrads[1], deny admission to the vast majority of applicants, and generally lean toward affluent students. Compare this with an elite public research university…
Brown (and most likely all other Ivies) is need-blind (except for international students). So, unless you think they are lying, your point doesn't stand on limiting low-income students. You point on size of college is an altogether different issue. "Beginning with the Class of 2007, Brown implemented its need-blind admission policy. Need-blind admission simply means that an applicant's ability to pay for their educat…
One factor here is that high achieving, low income students apparently are often unaware of the amount of financial aid available to them at elite private universities. They will often opt for a local state university, even though they would likely get a better financial aid package from the private.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/why-few...
"The reasons are varied, but a lack of finances is critical. Tuition can be prohibitively expensive. Elite schools often offer scholarships to low-income kids, but the schools have done a bad job of letting poor students know such assistance is available.
Professor Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University and other researchers found in a different study that many simply don't apply to elite schools because of something as seemingly minor as not having the application fee. There are fee waivers but, again, many don't know that."
On a related note, about half of UC students pay no tuition (this isn't an accounting trick where most of the costs are hidden "fees" - there are a few, but "no tuition" is what it sounds like in this case).
Another factor in the higher numbers of low income students at UCLA and Berkeley (as well as other UC's) is that UC takes a lot of community college transfers. This keeps costs low, and also may help bridge the "awareness" gap by making high talent low income students aware of the possibility of attending UCLA or UCB.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/upshot/californias-univer...
"Throughout, the University of California took deliberate steps to attract students of modest means. It kept tuition low and did far more to recruit community-college transfers than most elite state universities. The transfer pipeline is crucial, because many highly qualified low-income students— unaware of how much financial aid is available at some four-year colleges — first enroll at a local community college, where published tuition tends to be low."