When I went to college, I stayed in a dorm that was built in 1930. The classrooms I was taught in were built in the 1960s. They were all built on state land, an

When I went to college, I stayed in a dorm that was built in 1930. The classrooms I was taught in were built in the 1960s. They were all built on state land, and paid for before I started in the late 90s. The teachers were paid a modest salary, roughly 2-3x the salary of an elementary school teacher. Fast forward 30 years. The same dorms are still housing the students. The same classrooms are still instructing the students. The teachers are still paid a modest salary, proportional to an elementary school teacher, and yet - the costs have skyrocketed?? Yes, they built a new student center, and computer labs, but those were built just a few years after I graduated, and the prices hadn’t dramatically increased. Today, the prices have tripled. The money is going somewhere, and I’m certain some simple graphs would reveal the cause. After all the people complaining about the skyrocketing costs, I’ve yet to see these charts. Where are the investigative reporters? I expect to find wasteful hiring and departments full of non-student facing faculty, whose salaries aren’t paid for by grants. I expect to find not just one IT department for the university, but an IT department for each college. Even the residence life had a 10 person IT department back when I attended, and I remember being horrified at the waste. These organizations have likely grown. I expect to find the sports organization, including basketball and footballs are no longer a revenue engine, but have grown to be a parasite through creative accounting. I expect the non revenue generating sports, which were a questionable destination of funds back when I attended, have grown. Why was I, as a student, funding a world class swimming team? I never attended a match. My tuition included an invisible “tax” to fund these athletics. Instead of pushing to roll back the finances to the pre-2000 levels, the university continues to raise rates, and the students continue to attend, because the loans continue to get approved. So, when I hear politicians asking for student loan forgiveness, without asking the hard questions on why these costs have skyrocketed, and putting a system in place to roll back these hikes, I’m disgusted. It does nothing to solve the problem. Cap the loan amounts, retroactive to inflation adjusted from 2000. The universities will quickly have to figure out if they really need a synchronized swimming team, or three website designers for the dorm web page.