> 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.