Good article, but I want to clarify a point since it could leave the impression that it's universities themselves driving this growth race.
In the UK at least, we used to have a model where universities were funded by the government (through tax, of course) but the government also set hard limits on how many students you could enrol, with penalties for going over. The current model which Tony Blair in effect started and David Cameron completed removed this cap, and so opened the way for the current growth race.
Whether a university can survive under the new model, or even be better off than before without increasing student numbers depends on many things including the amount and kind of reasearch income, the proportion of international students they have and whether they're city-centre or campus-based. I would say most UK universities were faced with a choice between masively increasing student numbers or massively cutting expenditure to survive - lots of them seem to be doing a combination of both, which is one reason we've seen so many staff strikes this year. At least in several decent (Russell Group) universities that I know a bit about personally, it was very much a case of we have to grow by x% a year just to carry on paying our staff and bills. At least in the UK, I make a case that it's not just greedy unis and fat cat vice-chancellors driving this problem.
To give some numbers - the fees for home undergraduates are capped at £9250 a year and in a science or engineering degree with high equipment costs, it's hard to break even on these fees. International students are where the money really comes from, a one-year MSc degree can set you back £25k-£30k in fees alone although that usually includes doing a supervised project over the summer as well as attending an academic year's worth of teaching. Or at least, it'll include whatever supervision you can get this summer.