> Undergraduate tuition at Duke starts at $65,000 USD/year.

Does it? I don't know anything about Duke, but a lot of colleges I know of tell your tuition is around that price. However dig deeper and you discover it is almost impossible to not get scholarships thus making the real price cheaper. I know of one school near me that automatically gives everyone a 40% scholarship, then they look at your background to figure out if you qualify for anything more.

Then why not just lower the tuition by 40%?

Because they can compete on how exclusive they are because of their costs. There is no downside to a high price as parents now ask what financial aid they can get before looking at price. There is a lot of upside in seeming exclusive - even though if you don't live close to me you have probably never heard of this college

Because the really rich and international do pay full cost which means they can lower it for lower income students.

Really rich isn't that high a bar, you'll find out when it comes to tuition.

i wonder if universities can write off the "loss" of granting scholarships for inflated tuition rates? that said, scholarships come from all over, so if you're getting scholarships from outside the school itself, the school is getting all that money.

Nope theres no “write off”, universities generally aren’t for-profit and thus don’t pay income taxes. Even in the case of a for-profit enterprise, if a company foregoes income it’s just less income coming in, there’s no extra “write off” on top of (obviously) not paying taxes on the foregone income.

Thanks! I had no idea.

why are you asking instead of verifying the claim yourself?

I don't know how to verify the claim since I'm not a serious potential student.

you dont need to be one to check the price of a service

I'm not asking for the list price I'm asking for the real price that you end up paying. Those are not the same and they hide the latter. The list price was already given at 60k\year.