"The flipside of this is that we are talking about goddamn Harvard. They don't need high prices to signal that they are an elite school, they have a reputation

"The flipside of this is that we are talking about goddamn Harvard. They don't need high prices to signal that they are an elite school, they have a reputation that literally goes back centuries." Is this true? My understanding is that Harvard was a finishing school for much of its history. It only began to transform into a world class research university on the German model after WWI.