I've not had much luck finding historical tuition data, but was able to get some Stanford data going back to 1920. Here is a graph of Stanford tuition from 1920 through 2011: http://i.imgur.com/fXnjDNn.png

The data from 1920 through 1990 was only for every ten years, then it becomes yearly after, which is why the first part of the graph has more straight segments. Note the tuition axis is on a log scale.

Comparing Stanford tuition growth by decade to inflation, here is how much Stanford tuition every 10 years was above the inflation adjusted tuition from 10 years earlier:

  1930: 183% 
  1940:  41%
  1950:  13%
  1960:  22%
  1970:  85%
  1980:  27%
  1990:  39%
  2000:  29%
  2010:  23%

From this, it appears that if government loans affected Stanford tuition that did not manifest as a long term change in the growth rate. It looks like the long term growth is about 30ish% a decade in reasonably "normal" times. If the loans affected the growth rate it seems to have mostly been confined to around the time the loans first became widely available. In other words, if the loans had an effect, it seems to have been more of a level shift than a growth rate shift.

I'd like to see similar data for other schools.