It should be pretty self-evident why financial aid is tied to family income: to equalize opportunity.
True equal opportunity would grant aid on a merit system. Unless your argument is that familial wealth impacts merit, which I'd like to see evidence of, it's the fairer way to administer aid.
There's just assloads of studies showing high correlations between familial wealth and pretty much every measure of academic success we have ("merit", in your parlance).
I mean just searching "wealth impact test scores" on Google returns like 20 results that'll give you the evidence you're looking for.
Or are you saying your definition of "best" includes familial fiances of the applicant? Why doesn't https://www.headlightlabs.com/ include applicant's finances as a parameter?
Definitely feel free to point me to the studies showing familial wealth has no effect on whatever "merit" might mean to you, though. I've shown you how to find plenty to the contrary.
"[L]anguage variation may increase the cognitive load on students who speak AAE and thereby affect their understanding of and the speed with which they work through STEM texts. They examined the relationship between the linguistic complexity of math word problems and success in carrying out the computation for 75 African American second graders. They found a statistically significant effect for possessive –s (e.g., ‘my mama house’ vs. ‘my mama’s house’) and 3rd singular –s (‘He eat a lot’ vs. ‘He eats a lot’) on the students’ math performance: for students who were highly affected by linguistic differences, about 15% of them would have answered 94 more questions correctly (about 9% of the total) if these linguistic features had been removed. Terry et al. suggest that some AAE-speaking students face an added cognitive load on their working memory when they read and process math word problems, due to language variation – and time spent ‘translating’ while taking standardized tests is time lost."
It says nothing about the merits of knowing a second language.