How much does it actually cost to educate a student? A full load is about 12 or so hours a week in class (at least back when I went to community college). If a class has 40 students, and the instructor spends 2 hours outside of class for every 1 hour teaching (office hours, curriculum structure, grading), and makes 80K a year, that is 2K per student per year.
Now add in the facilities expenses (roof, walls, lights, hvac), and some labs need labs, how much should that cost? I still can't see that being more than another 2K, but I haven't run the numbers on that yet. Overall, it makes 20K a year seem outrageous.
I'm a nearly-finished Ph.D. candidate, and when people complain to me about how bloated and inefficient the government is, I think to myself "Wow, that sounds like a pretty good system."
A typical graduate teaching assistant at my university has about 10 lab sections per academic year. The lab fees--just the lab fees, not tuition--from just one section is enough to pay the TA's salary for the entire year. Even if you include the outrageously-inflated graduate tuition that a TA-ship pays, lab fees from just three lab sections cover the entire compensation package.
The tuition from just one big lecture section is enough to pay a tenured professor's salary for almost two entire years (and a tenured professor should be teaching 5-6 courses per year).
Some of the rest of the money goes to pay for the country-club campus, but most of it disappears into the black hole of bureaucracy.
And we haven't even started to talk about the scam of "overhead" that the university charges on federal research grants--30% straight off the top, except for very large purchases. Want to have a new electrical outlet installed in the lab? You have to use the university's maintenance department (and its inflated hourly rates--at least 3x what you'd pay a licensed/bonded union electrician) and pay overhead on top of that!
There is a reason community colleges exist: they are the place where the sole focus is teaching students, and so they can keep prices low.
Of course, you get a somewhat worse education there, due to the fact that the people teaching are essentially similar to grade school teachers in motivation.
Additionally, another important thing to consider is that the degrees that are actually useful have to compete for professionals with industry to some extent if they want to not be left with the dregs. A professor is going to pull $150,000 a year or more in many places, because that is what they could earn elsewhere.
And yeah, then there is the administration, IT, upkeep, dorm housing, campus police, facilities, student medical coverage, and so on.
But if you really want to know... any public university will have public records. Go check. I know that my local university has only slightly increased student tuition rates, and had a massive influx of students seeking lower prices. The problem is that once the slight surge of money is distributed, they are still on the brink of fiscal collapse due to how much the state has cut funding (they lose money for every in-state student, and have to accept them anyways) and are leaking their top researchers left and right due to the incredibly low wages they pay, relatively speaking.
Now add in the facilities expenses (roof, walls, lights, hvac), and some labs need labs, how much should that cost? I still can't see that being more than another 2K, but I haven't run the numbers on that yet. Overall, it makes 20K a year seem outrageous.