Why do top-ranked undergraduate universities not charge significantly more for tuition than many lower-ranked institutions? For example, in 2017, full tuition at Princeton (#1 nationally in the 2016 U.S. News rankings) was $45,320. The University of the Pacific (#111) was $44,588. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (#30) charged out-of-state students $33,916 for full tuition and the University of South Carolina (#107) charged out-of-state students $31,282.

Your response should apply economic principles (e.g., comparative advantage, opportunity cost, cost-benefit principle) to answering one of the above questions. Your answer does not need to be correct in that it fully explains the question. Instead focus on creating an intelligent hypothesis that could potentially be tested and refined. Also avoid using technical jargon for the sake of being technical. Your response should be able to be read and understood by an intelligent individual with no training in economics.

Each assignment will also highlight a different tool in the economist's toolkit. You do not need to specifically reference or use this tool in your submission, but it may be helpful to think about how the tool relates to the puzzle. This assignment's economic tool: Elasticities

Elasticities are a measure of how response consumers or producers are to "economic shocks" (loosely defined). We know that anything that impacts consumers in a market will also impact producers and vice versa. Elasticities give us a framework for thinking about how shocks will differentially impact both sides of the market. For example, we might expect for a cigarette tax placed on producers to have a larger impact on consumers (even though producers ultimately have to pay the tax to the government).