How College Pricing Is Like Holiday Retail Sales

By Marian Wang. Colleges offer high sticker prices but plentiful grants and scholarships to give customers the feeling of a discount. You know all those seemingly great sales during the holidays? It turns out, they are often a "carefully engineered illusion."  A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal defines what it calls "retail theater," noting that often the discounts being offered to bargain-conscious consumers are carefully planned out by retailers from the start. More...