My point is that maybe the tuition increase is appropriate, however, there should be more than two classifications of income. It is outside the realm of logic that students are only divided into “below 80k and above 80k.” While there is a certain amount of need-based financial aid and scholarship money, there definitely is not enough, and therefore, the tuition structure should reflect something more progressive, like the tax code (not nearly progressive enough, I might add). Hence, tuition should be different for families making $120 k a year and those making $1 million a year.

Just look at European universities, for instance. There the tuition is often little to non-existent. Now, obviously education isn’t free there; everybody just pays for it through taxes. But the difference is that through a progressive tax system the poor are not demanded to pay what they cannot afford. If we choose to have a system in which only people who want higher education pay for it, which makes a certain amount of sense, great, but we need to make a system that grants equal opportunity to any person who wants to go to college.

I do think that the income line could have been tinkered with in normal economic circumstance in order to allow more of the middle class to reap the benefits and create a more progressive structure of “taxation” (if we’re to negate actual taxation in the process), but I do think that if we’re to use the extreme structure you’re painting, the gambit would fail.

This would not only be because a tight economy means tight spending for everyone, but because the prestige/cost gap still exists for a few years after you make that raise. And if you really slap the Ivy League pricetag on a public university education, those paying from out of state/with the highest incomes are going to expect Ivy League education. Otherwise I do think you might see a shift in your high-income out of staters going elsewhere. I don’t buy the argument that high-aid, high-tuition models do this, but I will if the price range quickly expands in the snap of a finger.

Maybe you could pull it off with a gradual increase and some REALLY fancy PR skills, but you’d also have to have made most of your programs top rank in that time as well. It’s a hard pill to swallow when most people don’t know which business or industry will collapse next.

But I think in normal conditions, you might be right.