When the University of Chicago announced this month that students whose families earn less than $250,000 will no longer pay tuition starting next year, they were taking a big gamble.

The prestigious university recently was hit with a credit downgrade, is saddled with debt tied to building campaigns, and has laid off staff.

Given these challenges, this decision seems risky. And yet the University of Chicago’s strategic move recognizes something undeniable — a college education, especially at a premier school, is out of reach for middle-class American families.

One year at U. of C. costs nearly $100,000, including tuition, food, housing and other student fees.

That’s an entire year’s salary, or more.

Yes, the college tuition game has become a lot like buying a car — almost nobody pays the full sticker price. But there’s a lot of wiggle room for universities to determine what individual families can afford to pay, meaning the all-in cost can remain uncomfortably high even after the financial aid office weighs in. And such a steep price tag is enough to knock a school off the list in the first place for families that aren’t wealthy.

To that end, we applaud U. of C.’s decision, which will go a long way to ensuring affordability for many smart kids and their families. It’ll also promote economic diversity on campus, a good thing for the health of the school. The alternative is a campus increasingly dominated by children of the affluent.

Other elite schools have taken the same route. Yale in January announced free tuition for families earning less than $200,000 for the coming academic year. Harvard did the same last March.

These are U. of C.’s competitors, making college affordability for middle-income families table stakes in the competition for elite students. And they’re doing it with an endowment of about $11 billion, versus Yale’s $44 billion and Harvard’s $57 billion.

At some point, Northwestern will have to respond.

The truth is only a sliver of college-bound middle-class American kids will get into one of these schools.

For the others, the problem of affordability remains. Here in Illinois, the real issue isn’t just whether our finest private schools are affordable, it’s whether state schools are within reach for regular families.

In the past 30 years, in-state tuition at public four-year colleges has doubled, after adjusting for inflation, according to research from College Board.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, our flagship school, is home to prestigious colleges of engineering, business and agriculture, among others, and has no shortage of applicants. But that prestige comes with a steep price tag.

The all-in cost for a year at UIUC — tuition, fees and room and board — was roughly $26,000 in 2016. Today, it’s roughly $40,000.

This affordability problem is one born of the state’s weakness, as Illinois’ debt crisis — driven in large part by its pension Leviathan — limits its ability to invest in our university system. And while Gov. JB Pritzker has worked hard to ensure low-income students have access to higher education — 44% of in-state public university undergraduates pay zero out-of-pocket for tuition and fees — middle-class families who don’t qualify for low-income assistance still have to pay up.

The result is a significant affordability gap problem for folks in the middle, an issue not just for people who care about the university system but also about economic mobility more broadly.

How will Illinois respond?

Or do state leaders view public universities as exempt from price competition?

Ignoring this challenge would do a disservice to bright kids who don’t want to be buried by student loans, the kids who have wanted to study engineering at U of I all their lives, the kids who want to get a degree without going too far from home. Families with teenage children on the college track undoubtedly see the free tuition trend at the Ivies and are hoping some of that common sense trickles down to the public university system.

It should — if Illinois schools want to be welcoming toward middle-class students.

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