Not directly. Public universities in the US are chartered and controlled by the states they are in (with a few exceptions for city universities). The feds can

Not directly. Public universities in the US are chartered and controlled by the states they are in (with a few exceptions for city universities). The feds can try to use carrot-and-stick measures by playing with federal funding for higher education, but that may well backfire. Also, US states subsidize (heavily, in the case of smarter states like California and Florida) tuition at their public universities for state residents. It's unclear how residency would play in to this plan.