We said you need college. Then we jacked up the price.

The great inflation in college costs is coming to an end.

That’s the good news from the College Board’s Trends in Higher Education report released this month. It shows tuition and fee hikes have leveled off at most schools, and fewer students than ever are paying full price, thanks to aid and scholarships.

Unfortunately, the mild reprieve comes after two decades of sharply rising costs that left students and families more skeptical about the value of a college degree. We made higher education much more expensive right at the moment it became much more important. The damage to public confidence is likely to linger.

In the last 10 years, as jobs requiring a college degree grew and the uncertainty for those without a degree worsened, the cost of tuition skyrocketed. State budget cuts in the aftermath of the Great Recession led to steep tuition hikes at public universities just as millions of households lost the ability to pay.

We touted higher education as a necessity, even as we started pricing it like a luxury good. It was a combination tailor-made to create resentment and harden economic divides.

North Carolina escaped some of the worst of this pressure, thanks to a long history of public support and lower-than-average tuition. But we weren’t immune.

“Even at public institutions, most families can’t pay out of pocket for a year of higher education,” UNC System President Margaret Spellings said in an Urban Institute speech last year. “We have sold college as the golden ticket to middle class opportunity, then priced average families out of that market.”

To bring that market back down to earth, N.C. lawmakers set in motion a fascinating experiment that took effect this fall. The N.C. Promise plan invests more than $51 million in state funding to drop tuition at UNC Pembroke, Western Carolina, and Elizabeth City State to just $500 per semester for in-state students. Nonresidents pay $2,500. The plan effectively winds back the clock almost two decades on tuition costs.

There are still other costs — housing, books, fees and food. Students aren’t getting 1990s prices on gas or apartments, so financial aid remains a key part of the equation for many families.

But the $500 number is powerful for what it communicates. It’s a clear signal the college is achievable for students at every income level. It tells families that higher education isn’t a luxury or a debt trap. And students are listening. Enrollment at each of those three schools shot up this fall, growing by double-digits at a time when enrollment is flat or declining across much of the country.

During my years in the financial aid office at UNC-Chapel Hill, I traveled to high schools across the state, trying to convince families that the sticker price of college isn’t the real price that everyone pays. Some people pay much less; at a school like Carolina, the poorest families pay nothing.

The practice of charging higher tuition and providing more aid to families in need makes a lot of economic sense, and it has grown more common across the country. The high-cost, high-aid approach is effective at giving poor students a fairer shot at a world-class education and giving colleges more flexibility with budgeting, focusing subsidies where they’ll do the most good.

But it’s a confusing message for low-income and first-generation families, and a big political irritant to the wealthy and upper-middle class families left paying higher costs.

Low tuition for everyone is expensive, economically inefficient, and not the way most administrators want to run their schools. It’s also simple, politically attractive, and incredibly effective at convincing families that college is within reach.

If you want a people’s university, it helps to have a price the people can pay.