alt Hacker News> you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.
Perhaps insurance companies could create an insurance product to insurance the applicant against the case that he gets admitted at many colleges and thus has to pay many, many times the semester fee (or application fee).
Even getting admitted to two colleges would be financial crippling to a majority of applicants.
Insurance premiums would be a significant fraction of the average tuition, which would be beyond the reach of many.
The effect of the proposed system would be that most people would just apply to one school. If rejected they would try another next year, if they haven’t given up on college, and so on.