For the record, I’m not American nor live in the US, but I have a 19-year-old son who started attending the University of Chicago this year, studying economics. Just the tuition itself is $70k. My husband and I are lucky enough to be able to afford it - I still believe it’s an outrageous amount of money to attend college.
Nobody knows. Serious, there are a lot of factors people will point to in here. Some of them are real factors, but every time I dig in I discovered that they do not explain everything. Prices have gone up much faster than inflation for decades even after accounting for government subsidies.