The high price of college is leading to strange behavior. The latest is a proposal in the New Jersey legislature that would require an entering student’s tuition to be frozen for four and a half years (nine semesters).

The law would apply to both public and private schools, says this article on nj.com (Princeton excepted).

What’s wrong with this picture? To begin with, price controls have unintended (but predictable) consequences. For example, a school’s natural reaction to four years of no increases would be to charge a lot at the beginning in an effort to defeat the law.

More fundamentally, since when can a state tell private colleges what to charge? Is this just political grandstanding (popular, I understand, in New Jersey) or what?