I don't understand why the cost of higher education has gone up so much. My grandparents paid for college via a job they only held in the summer and my parents

I don't understand why the cost of higher education has gone up so much. My grandparents paid for college via a job they only held in the summer and my parents paid for college working part time during the school year and full time in the summer - both of those jobs paying a little better than minimum wage. Yet I'm looking at 5 years of debt with a tech industry salary. Having to paying for higher education wouldn't even be such a problem if it still cost what it did when my parents attended. Although, maybe this whole thing is that the military budget has gone up by 80% since my grandparents attended college and education spending by the federal government has gone down 10 times. Also with the fact that there are five times as many Americans attending college than when my grandparents did, I definitely agree it's time we sat down as a nation and discussed whether we as a nation should pay for our children to be educated to the level necessary to excel in the modern economy. I don't think the tax hike would even be that extreme. The reason tuition is what it costs right now is that it pays for the people who are getting free rides for various reasons. We got a letter from University of California once that among other things stated that only about 40% of tuition for someone who is paying to attend actually goes to education that student, the other 60% goes to paying for people the UC gave grants and scholarships to. [Warning - Napkin Math] If it actually cost something like $10k per year per american college student, of which there are 20.5 million students attending both public and private universities, we would need something like an addition $210 billion in tax revenue per year, or an addition 6.4% revenue. So your 25% federal tax bracket would turn into 26.6%. That's not all that much when you think about it. Or, the government renegotiates their military contracts to stop being price-gouged in order lower the defense budget. Then use the savings to help fund education...