The agonizing wait has finally come to an end.

After months of checking his mail box day in and day out, a high school senior opens the door to find a thick, heavy letter inside.

With nervous excitement, he opens the envelope and finds the reward for all of his hard work resting within.

Memories of sleepless nights studying AP Calculus and preparing for the ACT flash through his mind, as he realizes the blood, sweat and tears of high school were worth it.

He has been accepted.

It’s too bad he can’t afford it.

Every second of every day, high achieving students work tirelessly, committing themselves to time-consuming extracurriculars, brain-wrenching AP classes and frustrating standardized tests. Buckling under the pressure of their impending future, they never take their eye off the prize: the college education of their choice.

They have earned their prize. They deserve their prize. The revolting college price tag, however, takes their prize away.

In her Forbes article, “Many students can’t afford their first choice college,” Lucie Lapovsky writes that although 75 percent of high school students receive acceptance letters from their first choice college, more than half of these students end up disappointed.

Arie Williams, senior, is part of that 57 percent. Accepted into Stanford University, Williams chose to attend Calvin College instead. “I feel as though many colleges, especially Ivy League caliber schools are charging you for being a good student,” Williams said. “It seems that they don’t care how smart you are or how hard you try. I think that schools everywhere are getting harder and harder to pay for. It’s almost as if schools want less people to able to attend them.”

As Forbes displays in its 2014 list of America’s top colleges, 87 percent of colleges ranked within the top 100 charge a tuition of at least $50,000 per year. By comparison, the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom charges a tuition of $24,814 to $38,108 per year for international students, and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom charges $23,767 to $34,965, according to topuniversities.com. The University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford stand fifth and sixth, respectively, in U.S News’ “Best Global Universities Rankings,” yet they charge almost half of what most of the top colleges in the United States alone charge.

Two-thirds of the ridiculous sums streaming from families’ pockets do not even go toward bettering students’ education. According to a USA Today article entitled, “Where’s all that college tuition money going,” “The chief reason why costs keep rising is that education has become a minor player in higher education. At public universities, only 28 percent of spending goes for instruction; private colleges do a bit better at 33 percent.”

Where does the rest go?

Tuition checks fund varsity athletics, instruction, research and the amenities war that has broken out in U.S. colleges and universities. According to a Forbes article entitled, “The college amenities arms race,” “In 1995, American colleges spent a total of $6.1 billion annually on construction projects, according to a study by College Planning and Management. It peaked at $15 billion in 2006. Spending dipped after the recession, but costs have been on the rise—culminating in $10.9 billion in 2013.”

More than half of students cannot afford their first choice college, and even when they sacrifice their educational dreams, students graduate with an average debt of $33,000, according to USA Today. Although amenities such as Mizzou’s rec center, complete with a lazy river and a beach club, provide endless entertainment to students, its $50 million price tag seems senseless when 70 percent of students graduate college with debt.

More so, however, the tuition students and parents scrape together in order to attend an elite institution primarily serves to uphold that school’s reputation as a place of prestige.

“[Colleges and universities] compete with one another not to make money, but for status and prestige, so they buy things that increase their status and prestige in relation to their competitors,” Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, said in an article titled, “What’s Driving College Costs Higher?”

Thousands of American students must walk away from the education they have earned because they cannot afford to pay for a school’s varsity sports teams, because they cannot afford to pay for the construction of pricey amenities and because they cannot afford to pay for a school’s ego.

Counsellors, teachers and parents, however, encourage students to apply for scholarships and financial aid in order to make their college dreams a reality. Of course, students and families follow this advice, filling out FAFSA applications, CSS profiles and applications for any scholarships they can find.

In her article “How I won $500,000 in college scholarships and graduated debt free – and you can, too,” Kristina Ellis described her four-year quest for college tuition. “I just jumped in, spending countless hours tracking down any information I could find about how to win scholarships—reading every library book available about college and scholarships, surfing the Web for articles and calling countless scholarship recipients and programs asking about what to expect,” Ellis said.

Although Ellis’ story of hard work and dedication is commendable, students should be able to earn their entry into an educational institution through one application: a college application. Replete with studying, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and part-time employment, high school students’ days are full to the brim. Why should these students spend mountains of additional time proving their worth to scholarship committees to attend a school that has already acknowledged their excellence?

The business model prestigious U.S. colleges and universities have assumed is simply un-American. It cultivates crippling social immobility, barring low- and middle-class students from equality of opportunity. Although obtaining a college education is a crucial step in becoming socially mobile, tuition at America’s top colleges and universities is too severe for some families to afford.

“Colleges actively recruit ‘full pay’ students who can attend and will not need financial aid,” Josh Freedman, a policy analyst in the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation,” said. “A 2011 survey by Inside Higher Ed found that about 35 percent of admissions directors at 4-year institutions, particularly public colleges, had increased their efforts to target ‘full pay’ students. Far from wanting to enroll more low-income students, colleges recruit more affluent ones who will pay full price to attend.”

Without a doubt, less expensive schools do exist, and many offer excellent educations. Students do not need to attend a top-tier college in order to secure a successful future. According to Michael Bernick, former director of California’s labor department, “...whether you went to Penn or Penn State, Williams College or Miami University of Ohio, job outcomes were unaffected in terms of earnings.”

Regardless, when a student receives that acceptance letter in the mail, it should symbolize acceptance based on academics, leadership and character. Students should have the opportunity to choose their education based on their criteria for the place they want to spend the next four years of their life, with no $50,000 per-year strings attached.