I can't speak for all colleges, but most of the top colleges in the US do not need to charge tuition at all to make ends meet, regardless of the rising administrative costs. They mostly charge tuition because 1. most other sources of money are earmarked for other purposes, and 2. it's good for rankings and admission purposes to charge very high tuition and also offer large financial aid packages to some subset of entering students.
I'm not sure about all colleges but a lot have had the rug pulled from under them in public contributions. In the early 2000s credit was cheap so to extend the campus colleges took out loans and mortgages to pay for new dorms and classrooms. Sure if you were a big donor you could send a few million and get a building named after you. So the donors paid the one-time fee of getting it built and it was the students who were born the cost of heating, cooling, and maintaining the actual building from tuition.