[Godel_unicode]

There are at a minimum two dials they can turn, the other being lowering costs. Less palatial dorms, cheaper food, cheaper coaches, lower faculty salaries to name a few. They could do these things, it's just that higher prices is easier to get past their faculty committees.

[Fomite]

1. You'd be surprised at how vocal faculty committees can be about opposing raising tuition. Either because they care about their students and their futures, or more mercenarily, because it means supporting graduate students eats up more of their grant funding when tuition goes up.

2. We've already lowered faculty salaries - why do you think so much is done now by adjuncts that are pretty universally regarded as underpaid?

3. Student amenities have been shown not actually to be all that significant a contributor to rising costs, especially compared to the slashed state and federal budgets to support universities.

Many universities have already done a great deal to lower costs - putting aside needed infrastructure investments, not replacing both staff and faculty when they retire, the aforementioned reliance on adjuncts, and in some cases cutting or merging whole departments.