I posted this deeper in the comments, but since it’s so directly relevant to the topic at hand:
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...
This Salon article says:
“Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here's why you're unemployed, crushed by debt -- and no one is helping:
“Reading back over journalistic accounts of the tuition spiral from the ’80s and ’90s, you get the impression that all concerned felt it was a wee bit uncouth to dig too deeply into a university’s pricing practices or suspect the sachems of higher learning who presided over them of anything inappropriate. These were the journalists’s beloved alma maters, after all: surely they had our best interests at heart. …
“And so, beginning in the ’80s, university administrators, their words dutifully transcribed by journalists, blamed utility bills for soaring tuition. They blamed libraries, which made a certain amount of sense until libraries went dramatically out of fashion in the Internet age—and yet still tuition prices went up.
“They blamed professors, of course, since professors are the most visible part of a university and because it’s easy to hate professors … until the outside world figured out that universities were actually using graduate students and adjuncts to teach their courses and yet still tuition prices were mounting at an insane clip.
“Administrators also blamed tuition inflation on onerous government regulations … On society … on declining student population …
“Unlike tenured faculty, university administrations actually have grown by 369 percent since the mid-1970s. … But blaming administrators proved difficult for journalists, perhaps because administrators were the very people journalists had been going to for explanations in their tuition-outrage stories. Could their sources actually be the culprits? No way. And so, less than a year after the Inquirer’s series appeared, USA Today ran its own big tuition-shock tale in which the blame was pinned on all the familiar blame-objects: Professors, student demands, technology, gummint regulation. A 1997 cover story in Time magazine—‘How Colleges Are Gouging U,’ the illustration shouted—barely mentioned administrators at all.
“What were journalists to do after ringing the alarm bells for so many years without effect? Well, there was one easy answer to this frustrating situation: To discover that there wasn’t really any problem in the first place. That the tuition spiral was entirely reasonable, even if no one could actually explain it. How so? Well, if you examine what has come to be called the 'college wage premium'—the difference between what is earned by college grads and high school grads—it becomes clear that someone who finishes four years at a university will eventually earn far more than they spent to go there, even at the crazy tuition prices of recent decades. Today this is a universal way of considering the situation, always leading us to conclude that going to college is 'worth it'; that it is a 'bargain'; that it 'pays off.' But it only seemed to enter journalists’ consciousness in the 1990s, as on the occasion when Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, explained matters thusly to the Los Angeles Times in 1999:
“He said there has been too much focus on the cost of college and too little on the lifetime returns for four years of investment. Because a college graduate today earns about twice as much as a worker with only a high school diploma, he said, ‘a college education is worth about $1 million over a lifetime.’
“The mind reels when confronted with this kind of smugness. One wonders: Is there some identifiable aspect of a college education that yields that million dollar prize—exposure to advanced literary theory, for example? Is there a way to isolate that particular 24-carat nugget and leave the dross behind—all the plush dorm carpeting and the many layers of assistant deans? My guess, though, is that Caperton’s statement meant exactly the opposite of this—that there was no need to inquire any further about the tuition outrage. What it implied, by extension, was that since we now know the final value of a college degree (one million dollars!), the colleges can simply keep raising tuition prices and student indebtedness until they have extracted that amount from their graduates—and only after they have hit that figure will we have cause to complain.”