Inside Higher Ed also features an opinion piece about Princteon's tuition freeze, following my alma mater's lead from 2000.
While Princeton is larger and may carry more punch in the world of higher education than Williams, I will be very surprised if this decision triggers an onslaught of emulation. Only a tiny number of extraordinarily wealthy institutions could even consider following, and it is unclear why they would do so. The distributional consequences of the Princeton decision could be viewed as analogous to the early Bush tax cuts, in that the benefits will accrue to the very wealthy parents who pay full tuition, not exactly a blow for greater equity. If a small number of similarly wealthy colleges and universities did the same thing, it is hard to work up much enthusiasm for the virtue of the resulting redistribution of income.
As a lowly faculty member, I don't have a great deal of insight into the economic realities of running a top-tier college, but my rough sense of things from the annual budget meetings is that he's right. There are only a handful of institutions that can really afford to hold down tuition growth, and for most of those, they can easily find other things to do with the money they'd get from an increase. Indeed, the article notes that Princeton's ballyhooed tuition freeze was actually paired with a large room and board increase, and appears to have just been a bit of accounting juggling to make their budget a little easier to keep track of.
Left unaddressed, though, is the larger question of how long this can keep up. People have been fretting about this at least since I was in college-- tuition broke $20,000 my sophomore year, and their was a great deal of hand-wringing then-- but nothing seems to have changed. Tuition for top colleges continues to increase faster than inflation, and there doesn't appear to be an end in sight. Common sense says that this can't go on forever, but the system is designed around the premise that this will go on forever, so sooner or later, there's going to be a problem...
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"tuition broke $20,000 my sophomore year, and their was a great deal of hand-wringing then"
Not only hand-wringing--the new figure got spray-painted on the columns of, I believe, Chapin Hall. No one ever got caught, though everyone knew (or thought they knew) that our resident green-mohawked anarchist classics major was behind it.
I tend to think it was somebody else, just because said anarchist's M.O. was usually to do something mildly outrageous, and then brag about it. Though I think it was actually the Rhodes scholar physics major anarchist who wrote the "now you see the violence inherent in the system" op-ed after getting slugged by a Korean War vet when he tried to burn a flag during the first Gulf War...
I hadn't thought of him (the latter), though in retrospect, it makes sense. Of course, I missed all that flag-burning uproar, as I was in the USSR at the time, with a certain soon-to-flunk-out mutual acquaintance of ours (among others).
It's interesting to look back on that uproar over $20K now, as since then the total price at a top-dollar college is nearly twice that, if not more.
Oops, make that last sentence: "since then the total price...has gone up to nearly twice that, if not more."
I love it when I notice my bad grammar milliseconds after hitting the "post" button.