With the cost of postsecondary education – public and private alike – skyrocketing annually, outstanding low-income students are often discouraged from applying to their dream schools simply because they don’t believe they will be able to afford them. Some of these elite schools, along with College Board, are working to fix that.

Long recognized for their academic prestige, schools in the Ivy League are not only esteemed as some of the best schools in the country; they are some of the most expensive. These schools, well-endowed, offer seemingly endless resources and a shiny, sought-after degree at the end of the tunnel – for those who can front the hefty cost.

“My parents always said that these schools were for the rich people that could afford it,” Alejandra Rincon, a high-school student who attended an intensive summer boot camp at Princeton, told PBS in a recent report.

Though the high sticker prices of schools like Harvard, Columbia and Princeton deter many less-than-privileged students with stellar academic records from applying, a recent movement in the college sphere has reshaped financial aid in an attempt to make an elite education more accessible for highly qualified students.

As a result of this financial aid overhaul, such prestigious institutions as Amherst, Yale, and Bowdoin are using their abundant endowments to offer generous need-based aid, often free of loans, to accepted applicants from lower and middle-class backgrounds.

To some of these underprivileged shining stars, the idea of a local community college or state school can seem more comfortable and feasible than the prospect of a mountain of student debt. However, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby tells NPR this is not necessarily true to reality.

“Top schools often offer scholarships that not only include free tuition, but also free room and board for top students from poor families — meaning it can be less expensive for these students to attend Harvard than a state school or a community college,” the NPR report says.

Even after Harvard basically handed a free education to students from households making under $40,000 a year, Hoxby said, “The number of students whose families had income below that threshold changed by only about 15 students, and the class at Harvard is about 1,650 freshmen.”

“Overall progress has been slow,” Jeffrey Brown said in the PBS report. “Many low-income students simply don’t apply… They rarely have role models who’ve attended such schools and can guide them through the process.”

In a study recently published by Hoxby and Sarah Turner of the University of Virginia, students with high SAT scores and low incomes were sent packets of information on top schools, financial aid options, and 8 personalized, ready-to-use application fee waivers. Of the students who received the packets, about 54% were admitted to top schools.

Following this study, College Board – the organization that administers the PSAT, SAT and AP exams – now plans to follow suit and send similar packages to high-achieving students in the future.

The goal for top schools is outreach. The resources are there. The money is there. Low-income students can afford Ivy League educations. They just don’t know it.

As CNBC’s Kelley Holland remarked, “The possibilities may be broader than they appear.”