Something like the Harvard Law School debt repayment program: http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/sfs/lipp/participant-cont...
If a given college is worried that such a plan will bankrupt it, perhaps it should reconsider the value of the education it is providing.
The value of an education I can pay for by mowing lawns is going to be lower because that necessitates zero research, extremely poor student:faculty ratios, etc.
The solution, to me, is to drastically increase government's share of the burden. But try introducing that in Congress.
My good friend from high school was in a position of not being able to afford our flagship state school, even though he got accepted.
He basically made it his full time job to scour all of the scholarship websites and apply to everything he was even minimally eligible for. He was constantly writing, or altering essays to fit a particular scholarship prompt.
All in all, he was able to afford school and has since graduated and become a pharmacist.
Like in a lot of things, hard work and hustle pays off.
This strategy works for a few of the most shining individuals in the country in any given year who dedicate the time required and get extremely lucky. I tip my hat to your friend, but the nature of scholarship programs is that for every kid like your brother, hundreds more worked just as hard, had just as much hustle, and got nothing (or a little, but not enough to make college affordable).
Paying for school on outside scholarships is an impressive accomplishment, but not something we can reasonably expect kids in general to pull off.
The incremental cost of going to school versus "just" living is like $6000. Even the child of a rich parent with no financial aid should be able to pull that together, especially if you manage to swing any scholarship money.
You couldn't really have it any other way without drastically altering the structure of higher education: the alternative is that everyone's parents will "refuse" to pay and the financial aid system would be totally overwhelmed.
I am incredibly lucky and incredibly thankful that my parents value high-quality education and come from a tradition of academics who help their children through college. Some of my friends who are far smarter than me had to give up on dreams because their parents don't understand how inflation works and think you can still pay your own way through high-quality undergrad in the US.
That is, until you get to the high-end Ivies. Harvard would have cost me $12,500 over UW Madison's $24,000, but I was never going to get accepted there.