(10 of 10)
"Absolutely," Rodin says. But Fry is a bit more hesitant. "Put it this way," he says. "I'd want to test this thoroughly through research." His gut instinct, he says, would be to give it a go; there might even be a market advantage in being the first to break ranks. "But I know the sort of instinctive response is, Hey, we won't look as good as Harvard. It is a tricky thing. You don't want to get into a situation where doing the right thing ends up boomeranging and hurting you." Lee Stetson, Penn's admissions dean, frets that a cut in tuition might indeed produce an impression of reduced quality. Parents perceive that "quality is expensive," he says. "They don't vote based on cost. They join knowing it's very expensive."
Here's a paradox: despite the rising outcry about tuition and the fact that Penn's tuition and associated costs just broke the $30,000 barrier, Penn this year received nearly 16,000 applications, 3,000 more than its previous best year and nearly twice the number when I applied--meaning it is now twice as selective. Which makes Penn very, very happy. Last year, says Stetson, with thinly disguised glee, "we turned away 11,000 plus."
The main engine driving this demand is fear--fear of a capricious new economy; fear of the new disposability of workers; fear of being disadvantaged in the hunt for a job. Parents, says Robert Zemsky, director of Penn's Institute for Research on Higher Education, see the tuition they pay as buying not so much an education as a "medallion" with the power to open doors. "And it's probably worth every penny," he says. Indeed, three Penn economists tried to quantify the edge conferred by top-tier universities, including their own. They calculated that a student who graduates from Penn will earn 56.6% more than if he graduates just from high school. If he graduates from a flagship public university, he will earn only 31.7% more. Their complex statistical analysis yielded a surprising discovery: how well a student does after graduation depends partly on how much money his professors made. The higher the salaries, they concluded without so much as a wink, the better.
As to the fate of parents like me, the paper was silent.
For more information on college costs, see our Web report at time.com/tuition