Averaged over 30 weeks, that's $3.3k. I could pay a private tutor $100 per hour ($150 including payroll taxes and benefits) for 20 hours per week and still pay less than $100k per year.
It also hosts regular events and guest speakers.
It organises paid industrial placements for students, foriegn exchange programmes at no extra cost, it's own concert hall, a super-computer and, until he stepped down this year, you got your degree handed to you by Sir Patrick Stewart (Capt. Picard) but for my graduation I will have to make do with Prince Andrew.
There are more benefits my tution goes toward.
Economies of scale are a thing.
Yes, economies of scale are a thing. They generally cause average cost per unit of output to decrease, as total output increases.
As I said, for the $100k/pa cost quoted by the article, a single student could afford to pay for pay+tax+benefits for a 1:1 tutor, 20 hours per week.
Given that most university lectures/seminars/tutorials have a much larger student:teacher ratio, economies of scale should mean universities would achieve a much lower cost of tuition.
I get that universities do other things. I get that they need to build and maintain infrastructure. I get that they need to subscribe to journals. But all of that is spread over all of their students.
Regarding the example you introduced: The University of Huddersfield has ~20k students. Its total expenditure is ~120m GBP ($180MM) per year[0]. That's about $9k per student per year. That's less than 1/10th of the $100k expenditure per student quoted in the original article.
[0] http://www.hud.ac.uk/media/universityofhuddersfield/content2...
For three years of existence, I think that's pretty reasonable. I finished my first year with $1500 still in the bank and I lived in expensive accommodation.
Huddersfield is building a new $40m law school this year. It recently built a $20m business school and is debt free.
But my real point was that one-to-one tutoring is not the same as attending classes.
Yet, the universities are pumping out roughly the same number of graduates.
Why such high growth in administrators? Is our education now better than 1987? How come every other industry is cutting costs, while higher education is increasing costs and beaurocracy?
And no, higher education is not a free market, despite appearances.