One thing that gets lost in most of these debates is the fact that many students don't pay the sticker price that universities advertise. At most of the top 50 universities in the US, something like 50% of students receive some sort of financial aid/subsidy. These discounts are often substantial.
The $50k sticker price is a tool universities use to price discriminate based on a family's ability to pay and how much a university wants a student. Thus, it's not crazy to see a talented student from a low-income background paying something like $2k a year to attend a top-tier university. Of course, this doesn't really answer your question. This phenomenon still leaves the 50% of students paying full freight, and only applies to wealthy universities that can afford such financial aid programs.
Financial aid is pretty hard to obtain now days. Your parent's must be in the lower range of salaries combine for you to obtain anything other than unsubsidized loans. Pell Grants and other such things are pretty uncommon from what I've gathered. Once I managed to become independent as a student, I was making too much (35k a year) for any student aid so I had to pay full price (albeit I was smart enough to go to school in a state were education is pretty cheap, Florida if you have to know).
So the relevant qualifier to my statement above is top 50 institutions in the country. Florida isn't among them. To make the qualifier more precise, I was thinking of institutions that are members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE, http://web.mit.edu/cofhe/) which is a group of private universities that behave similarly.
Florida is also relatively cheap to begin with, as with many state schools (GA Tech alum myself, hehe). The big numbers are posted by private schools. However, the top private schools have great financial aid. Under $120k/year, Harvard and Yale are free. The aid phases out after that, but doesn't phase out completely until $250k+.
For who? Did you mean to pick a different state for your example?
For Florida residents, Florida state colleges are tuition-free for all qualified applicants, but these schools pad enrollment with students who do not show college-readiness but choose to attend and pay (subsidized) tuition anyway.
Not familiar with the programs at either university, but consider that Stanford is one of the wealthiest private institutions in the world against the budget crisis that the state of California is currently facing. Financial security goes a long way in ensuring that you're in an environment conducive to working on your startup.
I've spent time working with companies that do GDS systems (basically travel ticketing back-end infrastructure) and talked with a few startups in the affiliate/rewards space.
Load management is also used a lot in business schools as a case study of how more complex pricing schemes can be used to extract a higher average price than would be indicated by a traditional macro-economic demand curve approach. Basically you're segmenting customers and also varying pricing based on available inventory.
Airline seat inventory and hotel rooms as well are an interesting problem because they're essentially wasting inventory - if you don't sell a hotel room or airline seat before the day it's available, it becomes worthless. That's why airlines and hotels love to have reward systems where you're compensated with free travel/stays - it's a way to get value from something that might otherwise go to waste. (This is also why Priceline works - they are a way for hotels to get rid of excess inventory on a no-name basis.)
There's a presentation from ITA (a company that made one of the more known air travel search engines) about this topic, which covers pricing issues in much details:
Michael Lewis gets amazing access for the pieces he writes about finance. Not too technical, but he really gets into the characters that are involved with different parts of the industry. He's also one of the lucky writers who can write about anything that piques his interest at a given time (Moneyball, Blind Side, and essays in the same vein), so those are worth checking out as well.
Atul Gawande is a great medicine writer. He was at Slate for a while, but he's been writing for the New Yorker for the last few years.
Why can't I rent ebooks? All I want is to pay $X to take out Y books at a time like I do with Netflix for movies. Who do I need to talk to get this done?
I'd love to do it myself, but the Kindle is proprietary device.
The study of social networks is incredibly fascinating, but the discipline is definitely in a nascent state. I think one of the biggest issues is that there is operational definition of a social tie. If you a create a network of people that a person has interacted with over a lifetime, it will likely look very different from the network of people the same person has interacted with over the last 30 days.
That's just one of the big problems to solve in the discipline. Since it's not a perfect science, it's going to be hard to provide "just the facts."
It's hard to tell if these findings really mean anything, since this is social media's first year on the survey. And without more information, it's hard to say if a direct comparison across industries even makes sense.
you know, it's funny. most people would put the start of economic thought ~1776 when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. That means it's been around less than 250 years. Sure it may not describe physical processes, but economics does try to model the real world. SCIENCE wasn't too far along 250 years after inception. I mean, we still believed that the world was flat not too long ago. give it time, the data will come. mistakes will be made.
I'm very much not an expert, but that seemed optimistic.
Economy's problem is that it describes a system which contain (more or less) intelligent beings who read up on economic theory -- and the beings then modifies their behavior from those studies...
So to get data and build models, it seems there must be some fix point to that function, somewhere...? :-)
(To add maiming to injury, those beings change culture and probably basic motivations every generation, these days.)
I have respect for economy and economists, they seem to do a reasonable good job from a bad position. But I'm happy I went with other interests.
The $50k sticker price is a tool universities use to price discriminate based on a family's ability to pay and how much a university wants a student. Thus, it's not crazy to see a talented student from a low-income background paying something like $2k a year to attend a top-tier university. Of course, this doesn't really answer your question. This phenomenon still leaves the 50% of students paying full freight, and only applies to wealthy universities that can afford such financial aid programs.