>If you are offering elimination of credit availability as a solution...you believe wealth of parents is a good metric...
Perhaps a better solution would be merit-based grants. If you graduate in the top 10% of your high school class, Uncle Sam will foot the bill for the equivalent of in-state tuition/room/board. As long as you keep your GPA above some threshold, we keep paying for 4 years.
Why 10% and not, say, 90%? Or 100%? (100% and maintain a GPA seems the most workable.)
What about someone in the 50% range who decides after 10 years in the workforce to go to college? With no second chances, this is the tyranny of the Permanent Record.
What about someone who gets a GED to graduate early, to start college early; or someone who had to drop out to support the family and then get a GED finish high school and go on to college? What of home schoolers?
I can also envision school swapping. If I'm at the border of 10% in a very good school, then in my last semester (after the submissions for college have gone out) of school I could switch schools to an academically poorer high school and have a much better chance of getting the grade. It's worth $40,000 in tuition money, so some people will do it.
Or in my case, I took a lot of classes in high school, including some that were dual-enrolled with the local community college. While AP calculus had an extra boost in the GPA calculation, my differential equations class did not. What luck it would be if by taking more advanced, unweighted classes I happen to be below the 10% mark, filled by those who maximized GPA instead of education.
Or we could just give back a bunch of state-level funding to state universities on the condition that they use it to reduce in-state tuition, fees, and room/board costs, then let the academics admit people according to academic merit.
And then, just for kicks, we could fix our public school system so as to remedy the disgusting inequalities that show up at the college-admissions level before they have a chance to happen.
I believe Texas had a system like this for admissions. The top X% (I forget what number X was) of students in the senior class of each high school were accepted. This created some strange side effects where students were effectively punished for going to a high school with better students.
Perhaps a better solution would be merit-based grants. If you graduate in the top 10% of your high school class, Uncle Sam will foot the bill for the equivalent of in-state tuition/room/board. As long as you keep your GPA above some threshold, we keep paying for 4 years.