[washingtonismoney]

That's a misleading comparison, because it's just looking at the list price, not including financial aid, which has been greatly expanded at the elite private schools.  The price that a poor or middle-class kid would pay hasn't gone up much at all, and in some cases has gone down.  (I was a Harvard undergrad in the early 90's, and a Harvard undergrad today with the same inflation-adjusted income that my family had then would pay significantly less than my family and I paid -- even though tuition has roughly doubled over that time, the increase in financial aid for a middle-class family like mine has been even bigger.

I think it's misleading, however, to focus on the differentiation between sticker price and actual price. This creates material distortions in the price signals most markets communicate for. In this case, such policies of unevenly distributed tuition rates tend to advantage people who know about them--who are deeply familiar with how to work the system--and therefore end up mostly helping the people the policy wasn't intended to help. There have been more than a few college administrators frustrated that they haven't seen better "returns" from the policy of radically discounting the cost of college for students from low-income families. 

[washingtonismoney]

That's a misleading comparison, because it's just looking at the list price, not including financial aid, which has been greatly expanded at the elite private schools.  The price that a poor or middle-class kid would pay hasn't gone up much at all, and in some cases has gone down.  (I was a Harvard undergrad in the early 90's, and a Harvard undergrad today with the same inflation-adjusted income that my family had then would pay significantly less than my family and I paid -- even though tuition has roughly doubled over that time, the increase in financial aid for a middle-class family like mine has been even bigger.

I think it's misleading, however, to focus on the differentiation between sticker price and actual price. This creates material distortions in the price signals most markets communicate for. In this case, such policies of unevenly distributed tuition rates tend to advantage people who know about them--who are deeply familiar with how to work the system--and therefore end up mostly helping the people the policy wasn't intended to help. There have been more than a few college administrators frustrated that they haven't seen better "returns" from the policy of radically discounting the cost of college for students from low-income families.