[elashri]

Unfortunately the way students and the culture around them require in a university is much more than instruction hours. You need to pqy for all the infrastructure and the amenities that these students except and many will choose based on that. I was talking to a couple of parents during a visit recently and they focused more on what the experience their kids will get at my university. They were mostly not talking about education experience.

And most universities don't have any significant endowment and they don't work like what you think. Most of these are money for specific goal. i.e as rich alumni of CS program I can donate $100m and ask the university to invest them or put them in a bank and then pay grants for CS students. The university is legally bounded to not use the money for anything else. But this will be counted as +$100m endowment money for my university.

[dangus]

I understand that there is non-academic infrastructure and amenities, but I’m not sure the cost gap is very well explained. I’m paying a multiple orders of magnitude cost premium on my professor’s wage depending on the size of my class and somehow I’m supposed to believe that it isn’t sufficient to pay for some amenities, building maintenance, and other reasonable overhead?

Planet fitness can make a killing on $20/month gym memberships but supposedly the campus recreation center is the bleeding me dry?

This also doesn’t explain how my online state school only had a slight discount over in-person instruction to take classes online. Like I said in my first comment, my professors only performed live instruction for an hour a week and taught with recycled and off-the-shelf materials.

Unsubsidized tuition room and board is higher than the median individual salary.

I think that if there was some kind of mandate or incentive to reduce costs that we would suddenly see cost reduction with very little compromise. But as it stands, everyone involved is incentivized to keep prices as high as possible.