(From MindingtheCampus.com):
By Richard Vedder
When I attended Northwestern beginning in the late 1950s, most students paid exactly the same tuition, room and board fees. Today, only a minority of college students pay full tuition (“the sticker price”) from their own funds. At exclusive private schools, some students pay nothing for tuition, room and board, but others pay $50,000 or more. The variations in the amount students pay from the sticker price is undoubtedly much greater than a generation or two ago, although no one even tries to calculate that statistic.
At Harvard, the practice even became institutionalized, with low income students (e.g., family incomes below $60,000 a year) paying nothing, and those above that paying 10 percent of their income up to $180,000, with many still more affluent students paying the full fees. Harvard, in effect, imposed its own private income tax of 10 percent over a wide income range. READ MORE HERE