I suppose the argument would be that the "cost" of those services has risen dramatically out of proportion to the "value." A largely subjective argument of course, but if we review any of the data on cost over time of education (higher education tuition) vs CPI, really anything else, even health care, the disparity is pretty striking. The government propping up student loan programs (of which I am a massive beneficiary in full disclosure - PSLF for medical school) has made it easier and easier for students to take out larger and larger loans which has a heavy influence on the supply/demand of money for tuition. If money is readily available, and low risk (for the universities), then tuition keeps going up which can be independent of services offered.
Any data? What about
this data? Given the constant dollars 2 year private for profit schools actually cost less and public schools eeking out a 1% yearly gain above inflation for in-state tuition. Not something I would call a striking disparity. Many articles like to paint with a rather large brush for 4,000 disparate degree granting institutions with pretty drastic differences in tuition cost (from $4k/year to $80k a year). And they lump in the international student costs with their full year round housing (including summer and long breaks when most other dorms limit services or close down entirely. So international dorm residence costs a fair amount more) right along side out of state let alone in state tuition.
And even then I am not sure your definition of 'services' matches some of the customer groups. More than
a few student bodies have decided they want to pay more for more 'services' in the form of features and activities during their education. And the places that don't keep up risk losing enrollment. And that's before we get into building discussions, the increasingly convoluted web of legal, contractual, and vendor arrangements and the shockingly significant cost of regulatory compliance - all of which have seen significant increases over the past 20 years. Now that's not to say there isn't waste or terribly run institutions. When you have that many thousands its inevitable. But there is a lot going on beyond 'There is more money for tuition so tuition goes up'.
And this isn't to say there aren't areas that can be reformed but I fear the smashing together of all the data into attention gathering article titles\sound bites will lead to less effective efforts. For example most articles like to report on the average debt. However there is a pretty large gap between average and median debt. I can't find any 2022 numbers but in 2016 the median debt was $17,000 while the average was $32,731. So there are some number of people out there with notably higher student loan amounts compared to everyone else tilting the numbers. I suspect that digging into why that is the case would point to different actions we should take than if we just look at the average.