So room and board often gets separated out from tuition and while significant, is not the larger part of what a student pays at a "four year campus" college or university. One can also typically map room and board to cost of living in the area and find that you are merely getting a bad deal in most cases, not an astronomically bad deal.

A lot of the costs go into intangibles, like my college had some pricey guest lecturer programs. It is true though that university overhead has been growing quite fast lately and a lot of money in the last decade has shifted to things that are decidedly unrelated to education (I mean, LSU has their own lazy river).