Raising college tuition in the interests of fairness and access

There was a story in today's NYT about a number of colleges that are lowering tuition, sometimes drastically. The argument is that they can do this without loss of revenue, since so few pay full tuition anyway. Thus, they are lowering tuition and cutting financial aid and making a splash vis a vis the current concern over high tuition. 

The article makes a number of useful points: that colleges have done a terrible job at advertising how few people actually pay the official tuition amounts that sound so scary, or that there is a significant phenomenon of high tuition causing a perception of quality.  But one obvious point goes utterly unmentioned in the NYT coverage: that cutting both tuition and aid hurts the most economically vulnerable and benefits the less vulnerable.  (The NYT mentions that the college it most focuses on will retain mert-based scholarships, but fails to discuss the effects of cutting need-based.)

All of which leads me to float a suggestion for discussion - one that I once raised with our university president at a party, predictably being responded to with a chuckle and a raised eyebrow: let's raise tuition.  A lot.  

I suggest that elite schools like Georgetown should double tuition.  I predict that the very wealthy - eager as they are to have their children attend college in Washington and rub shoulders with the world's power brokers - will not balk at $80,000, or $100,000, or even $200,000.  (It's an experiment in market economics. If they won't pay, then we lower to the maximal level they will.) And then every cent of the extra income generated by charging more of, to pick an example of a student I once taught, the Emir of Kuwait goes to need-based financial aid.  The cost for poor kids would go down, and the charge to the rich would simply more accurately reflect what it really costs to attend a first-rate research university that also devotes itself to hands-on liberal arts teaching.  That strikes me as the right way to lower the cost of college education.