My take on tuition rates, from my experience teaching at 2 different universities over the last 16 years, and of course having gone to two different universities personally while getting a bachelors, masters, and doctorate:
1. State support for tuition sucks compared to what it used to be. The amount of state money that used to go towards state universities is a pittance compared to the past.
2. The demand for college has exploded and, coupled with declining state support, the universities need more money to make up the difference.
3. Students today *expect* a certain experience and standard of comfort, all of which costs a lot more money. When I started going to college a few years after leaving the military in the early 90s, nothing at my state university suggested high-living. Dorms had no air conditioning despite the fact that this is the South (OK, the mountains, but still). The library was ridiculously cramped with books falling down around you. All of the buildings had the feel of what they were - buildings constructed in the 1910s and 1920s and more or less kept up since then. I didn't live on campus - I had a family and a job - but when I compare today's dorms and buildings to then there's no comparison.
4. Virtually all universities have a lot more administrators, which costs a lot more money as they cannot keep talent without high pay since these positions are prime farming ground for the private sector.
5. Sports programs are a much bigger deal and universities spend a lot more money on these things despite the fact that most of them lose money. Issues like Title IX, which requires fair money spent on both men and women's sports, makes it worse. Sports used to be an ancillary function of schools, but as certain schools decided it was OK to pay head coaches more than the governor of the state it just put continual upward pressure on bringing in more money.
I'm sure there's other thoughts in my head but it's pretty late and I can't think of them right now.
My biggest gripe with universities right now, including my own, is that they let too many people in that don't need to be there, and there's too much pressure on faculty to turn out graduates. In other words, the drive is for higher enrollment and higher graduation rates. Neither one of those metrics makes any sense when you're talking about whether or not anyone coming out knows a damned thing. Everything is constantly being dumbed down in order to lower the hurdles of enrollment and make sure more people graduate, from the curriculums to the class material and textbooks to the policies. I teach both undergraduate and graduate students. On the undergraduate level, if I have a class of 25-30 - which is a ridiculous class load, I am here to tell you, but they don't want to pay for more professors - there's a bell-shaped curve of how these people will end up on a grading scale. There will be 3 or 4 superstars, 3 or 4 flunkies, and everyone else in the fat middle. Unfortunately, virtually everyone in the fat middle down to the flunkies will be going *nowhere* because they put in as little effort as possible to end up wherever they are on the curve. Instead of being able to spend extra time and effort on the superstars, which is where the most effective focus would be, all of the time and effort is spent on the the people on the bottom and lower middle trying to keep them from failing.
Eventually, the professors get apathetic and just pass out grades like candy bars. I still give out plenty of Fs because I give you what you earned, but I'm under no delusions that most of those that end up with A's or B's are going anywhere either because you can see they are like the employees that don't get fired, but don't get promoted - they do just enough to keep you from opening up the position but not enough to actually shine. Yet there's still this push out there that we need to *lower* the barriers to entry into college, when what we need to be doing is raising them. Liberal arts degrees are not worthless, nor are they necessarily "worth less" than STEM degrees - the problem is that there's just too many flunkies running around with these degrees, for the reasons I've mentioned. It's harder - not impossible, but harder - to be a total box of rocks and leave with a STEM degree, so lots of losers gravitate towards liberal arts degrees, leaving the STEM population with a greater percentage of superstars and a lower overall level of degrees. *That* is what gives them economic firepower.
