American universities are notoriously expensive. It is interesting to read that university costs have tripled in the last three decades (“University Challenge,” December 10, 2011). My own memory is much worse. When I came to Harvard in 1970, tuition was two-and-a-half-thousand dollars a year. When I left the States in 1990, Harvard tuition was twenty-five-thousand dollars a year. And in 2010 it was about fifty-thousand dollars a year. Harvard is special, but other universities followed suit as quickly as they could. Forgetting about discounting, the tuition only doubled in the last two decades, but it went up as much as tenfold in the previous two decades. That is, it exploded with the bulging baby-boom generation in the Seventies, but it failed to adjust to the demographic downturn that followed. In short, the universities pocketed the difference. And it is up to them to adjust to the times. If only they could do so after so many decades of sheer luxury.