If their tuition pricing was out of alignment with costs they should reduce them across the board.
=========================
It's not that simple. They are not selling engine overhauls or beef jerky.
They are in the business of providing a superior educational experience.
Much of what a student learns at college depends on his fellow students as much as it does on the faculty or the library.
A posh school like Stanford depends for bequests on the parents of it "legacy" students. These are the children of very, very rich alumni who send their often lazy, occasionally unbright children to them.
Students, like all people, have a herd instinct: surround an average student with geniuses and he/she is likely to strive to find a stroke of genius within him. Surround him with other rich, spoiled lazy kids, and what you end up with is what the University of Miami used to be known as : Suntan U. They are just now trying to change that image, and it isn't easy.
Many of the brightest, perhaps most of them, are students who are exceptionally talented, but whose parents could never afford to send them to Stanford, These students are absolutely necessary to producing a superior learning experience at Stanford, to keep it from becoming a party school.
So you have to charge the very, very wealthy parents of the legacy students so as to provide an superior learning experience for the less ambitious of the lazy fatcat students: this is fair, because those who most need the benefit are those that pay the most for it.
Not all "legacy" students actually manage to get much of an education despite this: Budweiser can thwart even the best-laid plans of mice and men, producing Juniorbushes of modest abilities as Harvard once did and is probably still doing.
