I wouldn’t call giving a higher price and then charging less “deceptive”. Deceptive in when a college does the exact opposite - says that they will charge $30,000 a year, and then, once a kid have been accepted, tell the family “no, the price is actually $55,000!! Surprise!!!”.
Most colleges need a number of full pay students, and, if the sticker price is $50,000, they cannot then turn around and tell a family “well, you income is $450,000 a year, so you now need to pay $75,000 a year”.
However, at a college like Colby-Sawyer, only around 5% who are full-pay students. SInce their acceptance rate is around 91%, that means that kids from the top 5% by income are not a large percent of their applicants either. So, if they want to increase enrollment and tuition dollars, they need to attract more applicants, so they match their advertised tuition to that which most of their students pay anyways. That way, they will not scare away parents who could actually afford the tuition, but are scared by the ticket price.
On the other hand, a college like, say, Trinity College (CT), at which almost half the applicants are from families who will be paying their full tuition, and these families keep on applying and enrolling, has no reason to drop the sticker price.
Dropping the sticker price is, therefore, a smart step for colleges which have a relatively small number of applicants from the top full-pay income percentiles, but not for the colleges which are very popular among the most affluent Americans (and internationals, for that matter).
My guess is that we will see a drop in tuition rates at private colleges which serve mostly middle class students, though whether this will save the colleges whose endowments are disappearing and who are losing enrollment, I do not know.