In the US, "administration staff" (everyone else) has blown up by 500% or more, proportionally. There have also been increases in non staff related costs. University' are fancier, more expensive and more income focused.
What the OP is saying is that education has become unaffordable because it has become expensive, not because of how it is financed. Fixing Brown students problem with donor financing is great for Brown students, but does not scale even if is sustainable at brown.
Whether through donors, loans, public financing or parental savings, we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.
So where, exactly, is all that extra spending really going? Is it going to six or seven extra deans and associate deans? (We have a bunch of people with "associate dean" or similar in their titles, but some of them are actually fairly junior staff members, and my understanding, incomplete as it is, is that their pay reflects that, rather than being what you'd expect for someone with that title.) Is it going to people who are managing the ever-growing presence of technology in the classroom and throughout the institution? That would actually make some sense, as it's a thing that's been growing at around the same time as the apparent increase in spending on staff/admin.
But in general, based on the limited breakdowns I've seen, I'm still puzzled as to where all this extra money is going, as it seems like most of it is not, in fact, going to inflated salaries for the top administrators (though some of it is), and most of what I've actually seen doesn't support the idea that there are massively more people in administration than are actually needed to support the students. The only way that could be true, based on my experience, is if a huge percentage of them (many more than in previous generations) are utterly incompetent, and pulling their weight so poorly that it takes half the time from the competent people just to keep everything moving. While that's not impossible, it seems implausible that such a significant shift could have occurred so quickly.
> ...we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.
I think that calling it elitist is jumping on a bandwagon of derision for that term, when what it should really be called is "unrealistic," "impractical," or just "stupid." In fact, if anything, it's as anti-elitist as anything can be—it's trying to spread the education to everyone, rather than reserving it to the elite purely based on the inconvenient fact that we don't have enough money in our economy to spend that much on everyone.
In business, if two companies merge, the redundant positions are eliminated. In a university, if two schools or departments merge, everyone stays and a bunch of new titles are created.
We most certainly can, easily, we just choose not to.
We could bomb a few less hospitals a year and pay for every single American to go to college for free. We could make our corporations pay more than zero taxes and do the same.
But you are right about the skyrocketing costs, colleges have bloated massively and for really no reason other than that they have begun to be run as businesses rather than as public-focused academic enterprises.
Anyway, I think that these days the left and right may have changed seats in this regard. The left wants more price/cost control and the centre (centre-right and left, but more right) is talking about resource allocation, in practice defending the market driven system. The right hasn't resolved to a consistent position recently.
I'll venture that it's the executives who are pulling in the big bucks. Looking at the glassdoor numbers, profs are peaking at under $200k, the vast majority well under $100k. Contrast that with Comms directors making $250k.
Comms directors provide more immediate returns, namely fundraising and spinning. However, top professors can write their ticket just to say they're there and earn a fortune on the side.
You can't just decide to reduce your income and expect nothing else to change. They're changing where their getting the income from, probably with the idea that former students of Brown who are now doing very well, will be willing to pay it forward to a new student who is in a similar position as they used to be.