But this misses the fact that a huge, huge percent of the cost is going to luxuries and things that have no benefit to 99% of students.

The dorms, gyms, cafeterias and student centers built in the last decade are luxurious spaces compared to prior decades. Perfectly good buildings are torn down and rebuilt so that a new donor can put their name on the building. Budgets for sports, clubs, and other programs have skyrocketed.

If you were to start a new school from scratch and ask the question "How can we give students the best education for a reasonable price?" you could do so with a university with 1/10th the headcount of staff and a correspondingly lower tuition.

You just wouldn't have a 15-person committee meeting weekly to decide if the company the university hired to perform an audit of the mission statements of the companies the university hired to provide consulting services to the student affairs staffers were properly recorded in the new document management system that was transferred from the homegrown IT solution to the new vendor.