> My comment was on the price of higher ed, not its cost, which is what your ed.gov source shows.

That's true, but as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.

I think we largely agree overall, the CPI numbers are close enough that I wouldn't dispute them; they align with my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices.

> In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.

This is probably true, and campuses could run housing at less-than-market rates. Whether that would be a better model than just giving students more financial aid that then gets paid back to the University as rent is something we'd have to model. Either way, my point is that we've seen a significant increase in the cost of rent across the entire country in the post-COVID era. That makes the Cost of College seem higher, but is something that Universities are subject to as much as a cause of.

> as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.

Just pointing out that nonprofits do not have to balance revenues and expenditures at all. This is not a mere technical detail. Profit cannot inure to owners with nonprofits as it can with for-profits, but this does not prevent the organization from building up a surplus over time, nor does it prevent them from paying employees very handsomely. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have almost one hundred universities with endowments over a billion dollars.

> my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices

That's fair, but I suppose there's more to it than that. Any number of datasets point to the cost of admin rising far above the cost of faculty or maintenance; and a lot of them actually show on an inflation-adjusted basis that schools are spending less now on instruction than they did a decade or two ago. So perhaps there's enough truth to the idea that you're getting substantially less education per dollar than you used to.