> still seems weird to me. is there any other product for 18-22 year olds where the price changes depending on their parents wealth?

If by “price” you mean, “net price after available subsidies”, then, yeah: healthcare, housing, and food, among others.

The difference is that the subsidies are usually public, whereas the education subsidies are by the seller—but the seller is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the entire premise of which, and the reason donations to them are tax deductible to the donor on top of the nonprofit being tax exempt, is that the nonprofit functions serves social needs in lieu of the government doing so.

When I was 18-22 and living with my parents (pretty normal in Europe) I worked and contributed to the house expenses. I'm pretty sure kids of rich people don't do that. If I wanted to take out a loan, my parent's wouldn't be able to provide guarantees and thus the kind of loan and conditions I had access to would be much different than those a kid with rich parents could. In University people could also get grants based on your family income.

Those examples are varied and are not the same thing as purchasing a concrete product, yet I believe they are relevant to your question - education is a service that supports society, not a concrete product for your personal use and enjoyment. How and if you get it, relies not entirely on you at that point in your life, but heavily on your parents and in general on your family as a single economic unit to which you belong.

It isn’t a mcburger. It’s an investment with an excepted variable return realized over like 4-5 decades. There’s almost nothing else an 18-22 can do that has comparable odds of increasing value of oneself in dollar terms and in impossible-to-measure-society terms than getting accepted into a good school.

(E.g. you hear about college dropouts starting businesses all the time. You barely ever hear that about people who haven’t attended college at all.)

Interesting question. I can't think of anything outside of the education sphere, no. Maybe someone else will chime in with an example.