Give Brown University credit. It’s putting its alumni money where its feelz are.

Amid America’s colossal student debt problem, an Ivy League school is providing an example of how institutions can help.

Beginning next school year, Brown University will eliminate all student loans in its undergraduate financial aid packages, replacing them with scholarships. Following a $30 million fundraising effort launched in September, Brown administrators announced this week that 2,087 donors contributed toward the goal, and that the school—located in Providence, Rhode Island—plans to raise $90 million more to sustain the scholarship giving.

Mind you, the student debt problem arises, in large part, because the cost of education is out of control, The cost of attending Brown for the 2017-18 school year is calculated at $71,050. There may be a lot of parents of Brown students who would like to pay that, if only they made that much money in any year of their life. It’s not as if the hand of God reached down and etched the tuition number in stone. That’s what Brown decided was the right amount to charge.

Pricey, right? But not out of line with their peers, because isn’t a self-created major that allows a student to learn whatever makes him feel valued and respected worth it?

The initiative, part of a goal that Brown set in 2015 to raise $500 million for undergraduate financial aid overall, “amplifies our commitment to bringing the best and brightest students to Brown regardless of their socioeconomic background,” university president Christina Paxson said in a statement.

Amplifies, as in turns it up to eleven? But the fact that this relieves students of being saddled with debt until they get that tenured critical-theory chair provides an opportunity for the “best and brightest”* whose parents don’t sup at the Club. And that’s as it should be.

Brown isn’t the first Ivy to take the weight off students, and their parents, to pay for its indulgences.

Fellow Ivy League schools Yale and Princeton both have no-loans policies in place, but many other top universities have income cutoffs in their financial aid packages, meaning that poorer families get better deals than those with mid-range incomes.

And therein lies one of the beefs hidden behind the wall of basic economics. If these elite schools were to reduce tuition as a means of making an education affordable and relieving students of the debt burden, then they wouldn’t be able to suck middle-class parents dry while giving poor kids a debt-free hug. If there’s a dollar to be squeezed, they will squeeze it.

The other is that this isn’t coming out of the endowment they racked up over the centuries, investing and reinvesting (even if poorly). To the extent they aren’t financing education on the backs of the middle class, they’re doing so on the largesse of their alumni. At least alums have a choice of whether to donate. And for those alumni who have enjoyed the opportunities an Ivy provided them, there’s nothing wrong with that.

But let’s be clear: Brown University isn’t sacrificing for the sake of the poor. Tuition remains sky high, because aren’t they worth it? The parents who have anything left in their bank account for when they get old and feeble get no love and are free to send their lil’ darling to Leland Stanford Junior University if they don’t like it. And the alums who get calls from the current students preying upon their good nature are trying to do the right thing, although at some point they’re going to get tired of the nightly telephone calls from perky juniors.

Is this a good thing, that poor kids get a shot at an Ivy League education they couldn’t possibly afford, to start their futures without being crushed by the burden of student loan debt? Of course it is. But maybe Brown isn’t really the source of this beneficence, amplification or not.

*Am I the only one who gets the sense that people who use this phrase never read Halberstam’s book?