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One other factor is the cost of educating the work force has increased. This might not be due to an increase in the education requirements of the job market. If degrees are common place they get used as a proxy metric for who is capable and who is not (while this is often not the case).

This means it's hard to measure the effectiveness of the current student load system. Is the investment increasing productivity? Or just creating another hurdle for people to jump over to get a good job?

A very specific type of labor costs, what I would call "non-essential services". These are the types of jobs where, now that we've grown the economic pie such that everyone can get what they need, increasing resources are devoted to "fairly allocating" those resources, via politics and legal actions, with the rest spent on objects of status.

Perhaps part of the reason those professionals are more expensive is that their degree programs saddle them with debt!

It’d be somewhat of a feedback loop

> The real reason college costs so much is that the price of all services provided by people with doctorate Or professional degrees has risen.

No, it's not.

> The cost of higher education has risen at the same rate as the cost of dentist services and legal services.

Most doctorates are not like those cherry-picked professional degrees and have not seen this inflation.