The problem with this sort of college price hysteria is that it is completely fact free. Here's a randomly googled CNN Money report:

"After grant aid and tax benefits, full-time students at public four-year colleges are paying an average $2,700 a year in net tuition and fees."

So, if they commute, like I did, it's just over $10,000. I hit an inflation calculator and that's almost exactly what mom and dad spent for me, 1977 - 82. So in fact, there's been no change in 30 years. Maybe we should complain that the price hasn't fallen, like it has for computer hardware; shouldn't technical advances have made it cheaper? ...But wait, it isn't a commodity....

So to pay his imaginary $100,000/annum Purdue prof, our writer will need to get not the cozy group of 3 or 4 others -- but 37 or 38 others. So much for his little utopia, the fruit of careless headline scanning.

If your parents are willing and able to spring for the country club, great, you'll make lots of contacts; that's the point, and of course it costs a pile; though frankly I'm surprised how cheap it is, given how far colleges do compete on a country club basis with indoor rock-climbing, etc. ... And it may be worth it, if money is what you're interested in. Lifelong friends can be made on the artificial rock-cliffs of University X; they might come in handy. (I wonder how much of the later-in-life dollar value of a college education as it is usually measured is like the possible dollar value of a country club. )

All these headlines about "average tuition" are a total fail statistically ... What they mean is the average of absolute tuition maxima across universities and colleges -- something that only the royal families of Persian Gulf principalities pay. The stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions.

Let me say that again: the stated tuitions of colleges are pure accounting fictions. Arguments based on them belong to the realm of fantasy and demagogical politics, not reality and truth.

I remember once hearing the provost of X -- a super-elite private univ., now president of another -- say that if it were up to her, she would make X's "tuition" infinite so she could collect "what they could pay" from the Saudi princes et al., and use it to fund other students. But, she said, the alumni always oppose this sort of thing; they didn't what X making the headlines as the most expensive school.

One can't help sympathizing with the alumni, but the massive "tuition increases" "far outpacing inflation" etc etc. is entirely due to the massive increase in trustees and others taking the point of view of the provost. Or put otherwise, the "massive increases" are in the degree to which stated tuition is an accounting fiction. This may be somehow stupid or corrupt or whatever, but it is a fact. If reality is under discussion a completely different set of data is necessary.

(I should add, by the way, that our writer might be able to get away with a cheaper prof. The average salary figures he is quoting include the salaries of medical and law professors at Purdue, which completely distort assume the salary facts. (And medical schools in particular are huge, remember). Thoughtless use of these sort of statistics stuns the mind. In humanities and suchlike faculties, at researchy places, people start around US 40 - 50,000 these days and end up at like 70 - 80,000. It is of course possible to be paid much more if the market has repriced you.)