I would be cautious with any argument about higher ed that focused on student pricing. Higher Ed is full of completely opaque pricing activity, where colleges publish a ridiculous nameplate price, then give enough grants and other financial aid that the average student pays less than $2,500 per year, plus room and board:

> Since 2016-17, the average net tuition and fee price paid by first-time full-time in-state students enrolled at public four-year institutions has been declining after adjusting for inflation; it was an estimated $2,250 in 2022-23.

https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/trends-in-colleg...

If you want to criticize colleges on their cost, the data to use is expenditure data, which is much cleaner.

I suspect the high cost of health care, education, and housing are all caused by the same thing: the enormous amount of third party money involved. People are willing to pay a lot more for a monthly payment over time than they are willing to pay in cash.

Higher Ed is being propped up by a second tier of consumer credit that basically lends extraordinary amounts of money for almost no interest, never allows defaulting and can be paid back over essentially your entire lifetime. Were it not for education lending, we would not see these prices.