I'm not so sure about this as a cause. If you look at the costs for colleges that have increased over time, you can start to see where a lot of this money is going. Spending on new and maintaining aging technology is increased. And now you have entire departments like Title IX that never existed in prior school models.
And with expansion, additional management overhead now exists. There is seemly at least a Director of <insert title here> for everything.
I would argue some of the things you list as causes of increasing tuition are the effects of tuition surpluses from additional income from a trillion in student loans.
Of course everything else has this issue as well. The only difference is most of us start small, and if it works we expand. You can't do that easily for national programs.
Is this American exceptionalism? Many nations do this, with great results.
On one level, I totally agree. At the same time, well-meaning attempts to make college loans available to everyone for everything seem to have massively bloated the cost of education to a crippling degree. I think the key is in the how of the approach.