It’s silly to outright claim they have no idea, run no metrics, spend like an heiress. I think you may not know how colleges operate. Sometimes, things are better stated as, “I wonder…”
The wealthier schools (is this what it’s really about?) allocate more to FA in a given year than they expect to spend.
Some on CC would like to think colleges have no idea what they’re doing, act in a daze, that admissions is a crapshoot. Frankly, that’s not going to get you anywhere. Don’t guess. Do some research, put the pieces together.
Or opt out.
@lookingforward I’m actually going to be a freshman in college in about a month, so I’m not really asking as a way to find a college or anything; I was just curious what everyone else would think.
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot of things about college admissions that I don’t know or understand – in fact, that’s why I made this post – and my intent wasn’t to “point fingers” so to speak, although maybe I did. But what I’m asking about isn’t what colleges will tell you about how things work, I’m asking about what (if anything) colleges aren’t advertising about themselves. I don’t think they have some kind of conspiracy going on, but I don’t think they’re all 100% transparent either.
To clarify a little, my intended question wasn’t necessarily to restart the whole financial-aid class wars debate (I don’t think that’s productive), but to ask whether colleges’ efforts to admit more lower-income (and as a previous poster pointed out, sometimes also middle-income) students has resulted in a measurable decrease in the percentage of wealthy students at top schools. In other words, are colleges actually becoming less wealthy, or just acting like they are as a public relations tactic?
I think @Postmodern says it best – it does feel like a paradox because every argument seems reasonable at face value, and yet not all of them can be true at once. I’m hope there’s a long German word for that feeling because I sure feel it a lot! 
@SuperSenior19 my comments about the search were back to other posters.
Many on CC will point out that many top colleges seem to maintain a substantial number of wealthier students, in the mix. These colleges are’t losing money for offering out more FA, they keep aggressively raising funds. And at many, a campaign to raise more specifically for financial aid coffers is popular with alumni.
But don’t miss the point that tuition from wealthy kids is only a portion of what colleges spend annually.
Ime, most folks don’t know how colleges may economize, behind the scenes. I’ve seen it. After the 2008 crisis, lots of changes happened and fast, things students may barely notice and don’t really need to know. Been there.