TLDR; Most of the cost can be traced back to staff, specifically non-teaching staff. With entire range of sport coaches to councelers on campus, things become

TLDR; Most of the cost can be traced back to staff, specifically non-teaching staff. With entire range of sport coaches to councelers on campus, things become expensive. Also, US has 4 different types of universities: public, private non-profit, for-profit, community schools. If you only take public universities in to account, US education system is actually more affordable than France or Canada. So there is huge variance and outliers which throws of the average.