Maggie's Farm

It's . . . it's almost as if jiggering with price signals for benign purposes ultimately degraded things for everyone.

Maybe the only way to minimize the problem is to give no-strings money to students who genuinely want to attend college, and then trust them to use the money for that purpose instead of putting it up their noses. Some of them would waste the money, you'd know better next time about how to choose a really able and motivated student, and the university wouldn't be tempted to inflate prices beyond the actually available pool of good students.

You can't do this kind of thing with distant bureaucratic money, of course. It has to be done face-to-face, which is another advantage.