The pricing is simple. They have a lot of wealthy legacies - students whose parents went to the school - and those kids get in. They also want to get the top talent, and for them, there are scholarships. The model is simple - the massive capitalist economy requires intelligence and a lot of will. The fact is, genetics and chance, while favoring the rich, don't favor them that much, and can give you mediocre-performing offspring. Someone has to do the hard work - and it's going to be the ones who get in with scholarships, who will get hired by the children of the wealthy. I know, it sounds distasteful, elitist, and plutocratic, but that's how the system works.

Your last step doesn't follow. Scholarship students get great connections. Example: Sergey Brin.

Nevertheless, the price most people pay is some factor of the list price and that can be very steep.

For example, here is the price page for the Harvard MBA: http://www.hbs.edu/mba/financial-aid/Pages/cost-summary.aspx

Harvard do not give more than 50% scholarships.

So we are taking about 54K over a 2 year period, just for fees, excluding accommodation, food and health insurance.

That is enough to keep all kinds of people out. And this is for MBA, a course that has a relatively high probability of leading to a job. The effect will be much more acute for Art History.

The MBA is a profit center. To see what it costs for poor kids, just look at the undergrad scholarship policy. Odds are, they will get a free ride if they have great grades.

Harvard does not have a professional school of art history. Art History is leisure person's degree anyway, and has no relevance to personal economics. Space ship rides are expensive too, and similarly irrelevant to personal advancement.