re: Begging... Free Market Style

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from the comments. -couldn't agree more.

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Disagree although not whole heartedly.

Article

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As a result, the tuition pricing at America’s universities has evolved into something akin to a discount mattress retailer, though Graber’s employer, a consultancy named Noel-Levitz, has come up with a more august name for it: “financial aid leveraging.” Noel-Levitz might be the most influential force in higher education pricing that you’ve never heard of, empowering what’s become a three-stage, market-distorting game for college administrators. First, conjure as high a sticker price as possible for tuition. Second, schools plow a lot of that extra money into student amenities, including country-club perks that outwardly justify it–and help with college rankings that reward such largesse. Finally, use your financial aid pile not necessarily to help needier students but rather to offer discounts to lure richer kids who might pay the rest of that inflated tuition price in full. The average yearly cost for a four-year, private, not-for-profit college is now $41,000–compared with $33,000 a decade ago–but the average discount rate for incoming freshman is 46%.

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America’s tuition pricing mess has a start date: 1992. In July of that year the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act changed the way that the expected family contribution was calculated and made it easier for students to take out loans. Meanwhile, an antitrust suit against the Ivy League schools and MIT established that colleges could no longer collude on a family’s need, a practice these schools had been employing for decades so that top students wouldn’t have to choose between them based on money. The late Charles Vest, onetime president of MIT, which was the only college to fight the lawsuit, argued for maintaining this seemingly clubby system, presciently warning that without it in place, there would be “wheeling and dealing and bargaining student by student, and there would be a shift of funds from those who most need it to paying for kids who frankly did not need it.”

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The system is screwed. Universities have priced themselves high to make money. They are playing the game by the rules...dumb rules.