Most of the money goes to salaries, and at this point, most of the salaries go to administrators who add no value. There's also a lot of duplication and nonsense in modern curricula; someone could easily do a better job.
It's bad enough the Thiel Fellowship looks pretty good; you have to assume modern college has nothing to do with actually educating people; seems to be more of a codpiece than anything else.
Currently I think they have an offsite particle accelerator in physics, but Im sure they had sensitive measuring equipment of all kinds when I was there.
There is a simple thought experiment to tell research facilities from teaching facilities: if they increased the number of admissions, would they need another particle accelerator?
To be clear, I am not against this: I do want the money granted to my STEM department to be used to subsidize the humanities, because they have their importance as well. However, it is not true that the humanities students "get the short end of the stick" when it comes to subsidizing.
STEM students required all sorts of wild equipment, some so specialized and sensitive that the buildings had to have extra protections built in so they weren't bothered by vibration or electromagnetic interference from nearby lightrail trains. Their tuition wouldn't cover that.
Of course, the school also splurged on pointless real estate expansions, a relatively empty, but massive, student "union" building, intense administrative overhead, sports stadiums paid for by adding on hundreds to student fees (which of course weren't part of tuition, but you had to pay them anyway), and so forth.
If you're a humanities student, you get the short end of the stick from many different directions- paying more than your education costs to support others, for a degree that will earn substantially less than others, which likely has fewer industries that specifically require your degree (putting you in more competition for said jobs against students with other similar degrees).