A lot of the prestigious schools in the United States could not charge tuition going forward for decades and be fine financially still, they have massive endowments.

Harvard, Yale, University of Texas, Stanford, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Texas A&M, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Columbia University all have 10-30 billion EACH.

Roughly 100 colleges in the United States have endowments exceeding 1 billion dollars. Even with a billion in a broad market index fund they could burn 30 million a year and likely never run out of money, I think the most expensive tuition in the country is like 60k or some such, so the poorest of those 100 schools could take at least 500 students a year for free and not go broke.

There are about a dozen universities in the United States that have research budgets alone exceeding 1 billion dollars a year.

Kinda makes you wonder why college tuition is so expensive at those 100~ schools...

And I don't think those endowments include real estate value or income from IP the schools own thanks to research conducted there.

How did universities ever manage to operate whilst charging much lower/no tuition back when there was not a group like this?

They only catered for a much smaller group basically the elites and a few lucky Grammar school kids.

Here is a related and comprehensive article that dives into the subject, for anyone interested: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competiti...

There were a lot fewer university students back when you could attend a polytechnical institute and make a living wage in a factory. With globalization and deindustrialization, Britain is now a "knowledge economy" so you have hundreds of thousands more in universities.

They were funded by the state. Funding which has been systematically cut back over the past 2 decades.

State funding.

Funding was shifted to fees. Although considering how much of student loans is not expected to be repaid it's arguable that a lot is still state funded...