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<p>Oh please! Sure they could. Indeed, I believe that the top 20 (or whatever) universities could decide to charge full sticker price, offer no discount whatsoever - it’s $60K to come here, take it or leave it - and there would still be enough takers and similar caliber students. They wouldn’t have the racial / ethnic diversity they are after, but if you wanted to measure smarts by GPA/SAT for the sake of argument, I bet their stats wouldn’t budge much at all.</p>
<p>And I don’t think prestige would be affected one bit. (And if it did, so what? Let rich people pay $60K for the Harvard club if they want. If prestige really does drop, then they wouldn’t be able to sustain that price, but let the market sort itself out.)</p>