Housing and Higher education are obvious standouts. Relative to other countries networking and cellphone service are absurdly overpriced, but so is tax prep, highway construction, and other government adjacent industries.
This is a known effect in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
"... the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth"
FAFSA is basically a perfect price discrimination system for colleges: why wouldn't they attempt to extract the maximum amount possible from each student?
An additional factor to consider is that higher education has increased the number of roles in their org-chart where Baumol's original proposition applies: the number of administrators in higher education just keeps rising. I'm not super familiar with the economics of orchestras, but I would be very surprised if the San Francisco Symphony is staffed with 4x the number of administrators that it was in 1978, even though the number of chairs in the orchestra remains the same.
Essentially the most expensive schools are priced as feeders into the elite collages of the North East. Exclusivity is a benefit when students are competing with each other students for placement into top schools. Other parts of the country have a much stronger focus on institutions with a religious rather than purely academic focus.
Which gets back to my original point. You get inefficiency when that’s what’s rewarded. It’s not that schools can’t operate cheaply, rather people actively want a different model.
Also covered in economics! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29
Being able to get into and complete several years of college signals to a potential employer that you are a better candidate. The more prestigious the institution, more difficult to get in etc, the better for the candidates that manage to. That increases demand, but the (roughly) fixed supply at a college results in increased prices and other things that reinforce the college (eg better sports and more successful sports teams).