[beezlebroxxxxxx]

A lot of "top-10/elite/whatever schools" can reduce or cover the tuition for the vast majority of their students mostly because their endowments are enormous. It's dirt cheap for them and is good PR. All Ivy-league schools can effectively offer free education to their students for generations off of the interest they earn on their endowments alone. It's partly what leads to the crazy inequality in offerings, quality, and funding, between higher-ed schools in the US. Addressing the cost of higher-ed is a worthwhile goal, but in my opinion addressing the crazy inequality between schools is much more worthwhile.

[ajross]

Most research university revenue, be it tuition-, donation- or grant-based, isn't really involved in the education of undergraduates anyway. All that extra money Stanford brings in that CSU Chico does not goes to building labs and hiring graduate students. Freshman Computer Science costs the same no matter where you are.