[ams6110]

You're not screwing yourself, you're taking responsibility. Financial aid comes with strings as well as a highly invasive personal finance anal exam called FAFSA (which database I'm sure will get hacked and disclosed at some point, if it's hasn't already, as most other big government databases have).

If you can pay your own way you avoid all that.

[zaroth]

That’s mighty puritanical thinking. When a family works their ass off to be denied financial aid and pay full freight for highly inflated university tuition, that’s not what I would call “taking responsibility” that’s just being taken.

College financial aid is just another policy in the pile of progressive taxation and needs-based benefit programs which conspire to enact a near 100% effective marginal tax rate on the middle class.