Yep, that’s the title of an op-ed in Forbes on Sept. 12, 2013. (Actually, the full title is, “There’s No College Tuition ‘Bubble’: College Education Is Underpriced.”)

Well, that contention came as a bit of shock to me, writing as I have been for many months about runaway sticker prices, and how colleges and universities need to address the issue before the federal government does it for them. What gives?

The author, Jeffrey Dorfman, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Georgia, is a believer in the free market system and a self-described libertarian. Let’s see how his reasoning holds up.

In his op-ed, Professor Dorfman makes a number of provocative statements, including: “If the federal government offers more financial aid, colleges can offer less while keeping the total financial aid package the same size… There is no savings to students and their families.”

Is it the case that colleges reduce their financial aid in direct proportion to increases in federal aid? Perhaps that might be true for the tiny fraction of very wealthy colleges that are need-blind and are committed to meeting the full need of their students. These colleges fill in behind the federal grants with institutional dollars, so if the federal grant increases more than the increase in their sticker price, they would theoretically be able to reduce their financial commitment – but there are fewer than a hundred such colleges and universities in a nation that has more than 4,000 colleges and universities. Most campuses are able to meet only a fraction of the student’s actual financial need.

Thus, as a practical matter, when occasionally the size of the federal Pell grants is modestly increased (typically, a few hundred dollars at best), the gap between demonstrated need and the proffered campus financial aid package may narrow somewhat, but there is rarely, if ever, any savings by the institution. So this statement by Professor Dorfman is almost completely false.

Professor Dorfman also says, “After all, the only people paying the high prices for colleges are the ‘rich’ people who the very same critics [of high tuition prices] believe in taxing so highly.”

Professor Dorfman’s claim that only the “rich” people pay high prices is based on the model used by a relative handful of very selective and wealthy colleges that offer only need-based aid. For good or ill, the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities across the country also offer so-called “merit” aid – and children of wealthy families, who have often received an excellent K-12 education, commonly qualify for, and receive, such aid.

But the more important point is that the rising cost of higher education has put a strain on all but the very wealthiest families. It may be news to Professor Dorfman, but there are a good many relatively affluent families that struggle mightily to afford to send their children to college. It is most definitely not the case that the only people paying high prices are the rich. This statement, too, is mostly false.

And there’s more: “Students who expect to pursue careers that are not high paying would likely be better served by attending lower-priced public colleges.”

Should students choose a campus based on their projected earnings relative to the institution’s cost? Or, turning the argument on its head, should private colleges limit their academic offerings just to those majors that promise high earnings to graduates? Obviously, students and families need to be very careful about the amount of educational debt they assume, and should avoid a campus that will require their going into serious debt – but otherwise, the idea is ludicrous. There are many examples of students who majored in humanities and ended up running major corporations – or who later earned a graduate or professional degree from an outstanding university, based in large measure on the quality of the liberal arts education they received at their undergraduate institution.

The idea that only high income (or likely to become high income) students should attend private colleges, while the lower income students should be content with public universities, thereby perpetuating social inequities, is insulting – and it ignores the fact that many highly selective private colleges are in a position to be very generous to high achieving but needy students. This statement is not so much false as it is patronizing.

Finally, and central to Professor Dorfman’s argument, is this statement: “[B]y the standards of the economic marketplace, most colleges are still underpriced.”

He points out that top schools such as Harvard and Stanford accepted less than 6 percent of their applicants this year, and reasons, “In most businesses, when you have such overwhelming demand for your product, you raise the price…”             

Should Harvard and Stanford raise their prices? Well, such a step would presumably reduce demand, because students (and their families) who were unable to afford the new, higher, price might reasonably decide not to apply – but presumably Professor Dorfman would think they should be content attending a public university anyway.

For an economist, however, Professor Dorfman, in recommending that Harvard and Stanford raise their prices, is ignoring a very salient point: Harvard and Stanford (and most colleges and universities) are not-for-profit institutions, and therefore reap the very significant benefit of not having to pay taxes. Even under their current pricing model, these very affluent colleges and universities struggle with the embarrassment of riches that comes from:

• having huge endowments (generating investment revenue that augments their operating budgets);
   
• having very high prices that (in the Ivy League) more than 40 percent of their students pay in full; and
   
• as a consequence, generating substantially more revenue than they need to run their campuses.

Raising their prices would generate still more net revenue, thereby potentially jeopardizing their tax exemption as a not-for-profit. So Professor Dorfman’s recommendation is not so much false as it is foolhardy.

Should we accept Professor Dorfman’s argument that college education is underpriced? My contention is that it is not underpriced for the overwhelming number of American families, and, should institutions of higher education ignore that fact, they will do so at their peril.

On Sunday 25 August, The Boston Globe ran a front-page story entitled “Colleges back off need-blind admissions.” The article describes how colleges such as Wesleyan, Williams, MIT, Cornell and the University of Virginia are reducing their commitment to meet the financial needs of the students they admit – but the story pays particular attention to Tufts University, located in the Boston suburbs.

The timing of this story is interesting, coming as it did at the end of a week where newspapers across the country were reporting on President Obama’s commitment to increase both the affordability and the practicality of a college education in America. How is it that these private schools seem to be going in exactly the opposite direction?

Yet the tone of the article was generally sympathetic to these colleges and universities. Consider these two quotes from the story:

“At Tufts, students’ needs have grown so much that the average grant for incoming students is – at $36,000 – roughly $10,000 more than it was in 2007 and 2008…”

“Yet it is hard to find anyone in the higher education field who blames these schools for cutting back.”

Well, perhaps I’m hard to find, living as I do some 40 miles away from Boston, but count me among those who “blame these schools for cutting back.”

I addressed this topic in my blog some months ago (“Down the Up Staircase,” March 25, 2013), but this new Globe article, and its timing, prompts me to look at the facts once again.

Consider: The Globe reports that grants at Tufts have grown by $10,000 over the past five or six years. Interestingly (and not noted in the article), so has the sticker price at Tufts. For the 2007-08 school year, tuition, fees, room and board at Tufts was $46,860. For the 2012-13 school year, the price was $56,546 – an increase of $9,686! So one way of looking at this is to say that the primary driver behind the increase in grants was the university’s own decision to increase its prices.

Let’s try this analysis a different way. According to data published in US News, for the 2007-08 school year, 38 percent of the entering class at Tufts qualified for aid, and the average aid awarded was $27,064, leaving the student a bill of $19,796. For the 2012-13 school year, 40 percent of the entering class qualified for aid, with an average award of $33,517, leaving the student a bill of $23,029 – some $3,233 (16 percent) more than in 2007-08.

A few years ago, Tufts had a capital campaign focused in part on raising money to permit need-blind admissions. Tufts raised the money, but had need-blind admissions for only two years. Now the new president wants to raise $25 million for endowed scholarships. I’m not sure if this is higher education’s equivalent of “Back to the Future,” or “Groundhog Day,” but history does seem to be repeating itself.

Tufts has lots of company. Not so long ago, college presidents wondered about the psychological impact on society when some college first dared to charge more than $50,000 for tuition, fees, room and board. Well, a college did, and nothing happened. No screams of anguish, no demonstrations in the streets, and, more importantly, no drop in applications. For the 2012-13 academic year, 149 colleges and universities charged more than $50,000 – and one had crossed the $60,000 line.

Interestingly, of the 149 extravagantly priced colleges, ALL had raised their prices for 2012-13 relative to 2011-12 – with one exception. Only Mount Holyoke had frozen prices – although at $53,596 it is still a very expensive institution.

As of June 2012 there were 45 private colleges and universities in the U.S. with endowments larger than $1 billion. With the exception of Rockefeller University, which offers only graduate education, ALL of these billion dollar colleges and universities ARE ALSO on the $50,000+ price list!

So what’s going on? Why are the richest colleges also the most expensive? Why do they raise their prices every year? Why are so many of them pulling back their financial assistance when, by any normal standard, they are incredibly wealthy?

There are several answers, all pulling in the same direction, but the fundamental answer is that the number one concern of these colleges and universities is maintaining, and, if possible, improving their rankings. Of far greater importance than using their endowments to become more affordable, by offering larger financial aid packages, or even – perish the thought! – reducing their prices, is not losing reputational ground to their competitors.

They fear that a lower price will be interpreted as a lower quality education. After all, the American consumer has been trained almost from birth to believe that “you get what you pay for” – and if you are paying less, you must be getting less.

And then there is the cachet of being exclusive because of being expensive. If too many people could afford a particular college, it would lose its allure to the very rich. Oh, the horror! That would never do!

Consequently, we will not see very many of these colleges and universities embracing President Obama’s call for greater affordability any time soon. They are too busy catering to the 1 percent. Affordability is for colleges that have neither the hope nor the desire of ever being exclusive – and that’s why leadership in the area of cost containment and increased affordability will come not from the top, but from the second-tier colleges, where price sensitivity has become a real issue, especially since the economic collapse of 2008.

So when you see wealthy colleges wringing their hands and weeping over their “inability” (read: “unwillingness”) to be need-blind, just remember it’s not genuine despair you are seeing; it’s crocodile tears.