That is exactly the argument of the paper the OP is promoting [1]: that the cost of education is due to the "Baumol Effect:" it is an industry dominated by the

That is exactly the argument of the paper the OP is promoting [1]: that the cost of education is due to the "Baumol Effect:" it is an industry dominated by the cost of human contact (the teacher's time) and human contact is not subject to productivity gains in the same way other goods are. In other words, it isn't that education isn't unusually expensive, it's that everything else is unusually cheap. From the paper's conclusion: "The Baumol effect is the best explanation for rising prices in education, healthcare, and other service sectors. In that sense, and only in that sense, is there something “wrong” with the service sector—namely, that it’s hard to increase productivity in services. Or we could equally well say that what’s right with the goods-producing sector is that it’s easier to increase productivity in goods. Whatever the explanation for this difference in productivity growth, however, it’s a difference, like the difficulty of domesticating huckleberries, that cannot be traced back to policy. We should neither ignore this difference nor make too much of it." That's the paper's perspective. I'm not promoting it myself, but I did find it to be a sensible argument. [1] https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-are-the-prices-so-damn-high_v1.pdf https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...