"A soon-to-be-published book by a Princeton sociologist found that low-income minority students (mainly African-Americans and Hispanics) who have good grades and test scores appear to have an edge over whites and Asians with similar grades and test scores (but not necessarily other factors such as extracurricular activities or recommendations, which were not considered in this study) at getting into the elite private colleges that tend to give out the most scholarships," U.S. News & World Report reports. "But by U.S. News's count, only 54 of the 5,000-plus American colleges and universities promise to provide enough scholarships to meet all students' financial need. And those colleges give plenty of aid to the far greater numbers of middle- and upper-middle-class students whom they admit. Harvard, for example, charges no more than 10 percent of a family's income for all those who earn $180,000 or less. A few dozen other schools promise to meet the need of students from low-income families only, typically cutting their generosity off at annual incomes of about $40,000. The few students who meet these criteria may very well receive better financial aid deals than similar students who aren't lucky enough to win admission or whose families earn slightly more than their school's cutoff.But the numbers of students who get this advantage is surprisingly tiny."