Except that public education doesn't set its own price. The legislature does. And if you look at the difficulty of getting into many schools (median GPA of incoming students at my campus was a 4.2) that suggests that tuition is priced well *below* demand. We had 120,000 application for 4,000 seats. We could have doubled tuition and still found enough qualified students. Clearly we were not responding to market dynamics. College loans *should* cause universities to expand because they make college more affordable. The state doesn't have a profit motive here. They do have an educated workforce motive, so their drive is more students completing degrees, not more profit from students, because there are no profits from students. Not even at privates. Their endowments don't come from excess tuition but from donors.

I worked at a UC. So top tier research university. We absolutely paid faculty hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially in market competitive disciplines. I've been involved in retention pay increases of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The professor does not get salary in that way off of grants. They can build in 3 months of salary into a grant (most faculty have 9 month appointments) and at some institutions can use a grant to buy out their teaching. But in most cases the salary is coming out of the larger pool of money of state subsidy, tuition, grant overhead, and external funding sources. In the case of medical faculty, there is also usually a clear split between the teaching institution and a hospital/clinic.

And you're right that the faculty aren't the sole driver of that inflation, but they also aren't the sole source of rising costs. A blackboard and a bunch of tablet chairs are no longer adequate for teaching. We record lectures, transcribe them for accessibility, we have large technology budgets and support around instruction. Lab costs have skyrocketed because again, students still take up the same amount of space as they did 50 years ago, but what's in the lab has changed. A basic computer lab is $1000/sq ft to build. A STEM lab is often 5 times that much. It's not enough to give our EEs a soldering iron and a handful of analogue meters like the 1960s, now it's a programmable oscilloscope at $50K per station, because the market these students are going into has also changed. That lab needs tech support, and the harder we run the institution, the more those costs go up. Want to keep that lab occupied 40 hours a week - you'll need at least two techs available to keep the equipment running and the lab configured as needed. You can't have one tech working from 7AM to 10PM 5 days a week. We could run the lab less, but now we need another lab, that's another $5M to build.

Building and securing a semi-public wireless network that spans multiple square miles is incredibly expensive. Universities typically have their own cellular infrastructure as well. How good are the people who do this? Apple used to hire our techs to design and setup their infrastructure for product announcements back when they were operating out of rented facilities. They were the best you could get, and they aren't cheap. But students losing network access in the middle of an exam, or during a class is a bit of a calamity.

And as you saw last night if you watched the coverage, you saw a quite good response to an active shooter. Universities have to now massively overspend on police and training. Classroom costs skyrocket when you incorporate active shooter safety issues into their design, which we now do on all new constructions. Universities also now invest heavily in other emergency planning. When covid broke out, we had N95s. We had shipping containers full of them, because we have fires here, we are prepared for potential chemical and biological attacks, because we are in a high target terrorism area. We have equipment to do search and rescue for a campus of 50,000 people after an earthquake, emergency food and water and all that.

NONE of these things were in budgets 25 years ago when I started. Some is that the safety issues have dramatically increased - guns, fires. Some is that the expectations have changed - earthquakes, etc.

I just retired 2 years ago and I was a pretty high level administrator and made less than 6 figures (cost was over 6 due to benefits) and for some of my time I had to generate my own salary. That's a LOT of administrators. We expanded into community education programs - summer camps for K-12 students, things like that. We hired a bunch of administrators for those programs. Why? Because there was no way to cover the costs of our needed growth without additional revenue. Our administration cost growth was in areas where they were expected to raise their salary. Yeah, you have high level institution administrators, but they aren't as expensive as you might think. If one of those 6 figure salary faculty becomes a slightly higher 6 figure salary administrator, and you hire a 5 figure adjunct to cover their classes while they are administrator, you haven't increased your costs by that administrators salary, just by the delta from their teaching salary plus the cost of the adjunct. Our university had about the same budget as Twitter did have in revenue. What would you expect CEO pay for that company to be? They aren't small organizations.

If you think wages for professors haven't risen that much, it's because of how universities have abused the adjunct system to make it appear that way. Rank and file faculty make good money. Depending on discipline, they make very good money. You don't think doctors at a top research hospital aren't making near 7 figures? They are the faculty.