@prospect1, consider that 1.5% of US households make $250K or more. There are about 4M births in the US each year. So 60K would be from those households. That’s not counting the internationals and foreign-born who are full-pay. Now, not all of the applicant pool are so well-off, but they don’t have to be. The elite privates provide fin aid to about half their students (give or take). Kids in high-income households are overrepresented in the group with high stats and impressive ECs. The total undergrad population at all private Ivies+equivalents is about 100K. 25K/year. Roughly half have to be full-pay. 12.5K. Take out internationals. Then consider that a good chunk of the full-pays are “doughnut hole” families who make less than $250K, don’t get any fin aid, yet still manage to stretch to afford full-tuition.
Looking at the math, it doesn’t seem like the Ivies+equivalents have to lower their standards to get a sufficient number of full-pay kids to fund their fin aid programs and so can afford to be both need-blind and meet full-need.
Go lower down the totem pole and that’s definitely not true.