I have no idea, but I would think the sports department of any college would be run more like a profit generating business (or any losses would be tracked, but

I have no idea, but I would think the sports department of any college would be run more like a profit generating business (or any losses would be tracked, but treated like "advertising" or investment in "prestige"). We tend to think of inflation and spending power as something that changes over time and affects all goods equally, but this is one of the big problems education and healthcare share; they're driven by humans. Food, furniture, and clothes have dropped in cost significantly over 100 years and the productivity of a single worker has skyrocketed. Education and healthcare have very similar ratios of patient:doctor and student:teacher over the past 100 years, so those higher salaries affect the cost. There's been a lot of talk that the true cost of teachers has been historically undervalued since women were discriminated out of most other jobs (this may not necessarily apply to colleges). Now that women have more opportunities, there's more pressure to pay the true cost of these teachers. I do realize that colleges have push for fewer tenured professors, brought on more TAs and temporary teachers, and administrative headcount has ballooned. But that hasn't had anywhere near the magnitude of change most other industries have made. Everyone knows you go to business school to network and a other degrees are branding (if they have X degree from school Y, you're confident they've they've met some bar). Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it'd be an uphill climb to disrupt that. Even if they get replaced, I can only see it happening by another monolithic institution that would carry all of the baggage associated with that. I think Coursera has been making very strong efforts for many years, but still hasn't found a successful model.