Your speaking in half truths, taking inflation into account the increase intuition is mostly related to lack of funding for state schools. Consider a few states hand out fee rides to a significant faction of students who meet basic qualifications. The real issue is most states have been poorly run over the last 50 years and face a wide range of funding issues related to pensions and healthcare issues.
PS: In the University of California system, the per-student cost of providing education has actually gone down: total university-system expenditures divided by number of students produces a number about 20-25% lower today than it was in the '70s, in real-dollar terms.
Time for the rich colleges to find better use of their endowments then. Berkley has three billion in endowments according to a 2011 report, I do not have current numbers. Some famous East coast schools have numbers that dwarf it.
According to Wikipedia the University of California system as a whole has over ten billion dollars in various endowment categories. More telling is they have over thirteen thousand administrative employees and just over ninety thousand academic employees. That compares to only two hundred thirty six thousand students. Gee, I wonder where the problem is? Two students per employee is a lot of money to make up
That 10 billion endowment for all the university's in California (UC,CSU,CCC) would cover less than six months of the just the University of California's (UC) operating budget before being used up. So yes it's a big number but it's also not actually all that helpful. http://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/index/chapt...
state educational appropriations constituted only 12 percent of UC's operating budget in 2010-11 compared to 23 percent in 2001-02. In 2011-12, the state cut UC's budget an additional $750 million.
> Consider a few states hand out fee rides to a significant faction of students who meet basic qualifications.
I lived in one of the states in question, Florida, that a had program called Bright Futures (no longer exists) that provided automatic tuition assistance based on GPA. However, that program, even in the best case, would only cover tuition expense. All other expenses were up to the student to handle.
However, the vast majority of recipients of bright futures left college with debt. With the program done, the amount of debt accumulated has done up as tuition continues to get more expensive and assistance for tuition becomes harder to get.
Both Why Does College Cost So Much? and the link account for inflation; in fact, the last sentence in the first paragraph of the link says, "And, yes, those are inflation-adjusted dollars."
I was going for clarity. The linked article quotes several non inflation adjusted numbers just look at:
http://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/archive/TS-winte.... Which show 229 for instate tuition a quarter 229 * 3 = 687 which was quoted and thus clearly not an inflation adjusted number.
Over the long term it's more or less kept up with inflation, however there have been a few big bumps such as Carter raising it from 2.30 to 3.35 in 1981. Which in inflation adjusted terms was 5.72 to 8.33 in 2012 dollars. Aka well below current to slightly above current minimum wage.
PS: In the University of California system, the per-student cost of providing education has actually gone down: total university-system expenditures divided by number of students produces a number about 20-25% lower today than it was in the '70s, in real-dollar terms.