I know... I went to a school with a sticker price over 50k+, and never lived in a dorm that was built after the stock market crash in '29.

Wondered where all the money went, until I realized that six-figure salaries for deans and sub-deans and senior administrators and grand poobahs of diversity studies for every imaginable slicing and dicing of the student population doesn't come cheap, nor does effectively running a jobs program for the entire 100 mile radius, vastly overstaffing custodial and food service workers at hourly rates two or three times market rate in the area.

When I was applying to college in 2006, one of the big selling points at the University of Alabama was that the honors dorms had a lazy river.

I wonder if the "fancy" dorms are only a thing in non-city universities. It would make sense that building fancy, new dorms in a downtown area in a place like Boston or New York just wouldn't be worth it.

Universities get a property tax exemption that allows them to do things with land in downtown areas that wouldn't be economically rational for typical real estate investors.