I received a large financial aid package structured as an institutional scholarship. My dad's business failed my freshman year. He liquidated its assets, as those had served as his modest "retirement" fund. This windfall left me ineligible for financial aid, which means I lost that scholarship. Forever. It was not eligible for renewal the following years--no matter how little my parents earned.
Prior to accepting the offer, I called the financial aid office asking questions I thought would help me determine the money would be there. They gave every assurance it would. Nothing was in writing. There's no contract to read and sign. How's a 17 year-old first gen student supposed to navigate that?
I did not graduate.
Certainly my experience at another Ivy has been that this one goes out of their way to make sure students are funded, and will usually accept even egregiously late paperwork with no reduction in financial aid.
Every semester they cut _me_ a check; I graduated without loans; and they didn't include my intern salaries in my earnings (so even though I was making more in a summer than my parent did in a year, it didn't affect my financial aid).
What I saw was that since the schools give a lot of grants / reduced tuition to students that come from families that make less than $X, a lot of parents tend to rig their returns to make less than $X.
If you own your own business, it's easy to game your income.
If the Ivies want to say, "we're a school for the rich, tuition is $XXXK, put up the cash or don't come here", that is 100% their right as private institutions. But if they promise that aid will be provided to anyone who needs it, and they then revoke that promise on a whim when someone is already partway through their degree, they are lying bastards and need to be called out on it.