I'm not convinced American universities are unusually expensive. Its an costly business. Does anyone have good figures for what the cost/student is globally?
Here in Sweden university education costs less per head than highschool education (we of course pay for research separately). In Russia there's even one university, the Independent University of Moscow, which is just a bunch of mathematicians who give courses.
University education can be made into something really hardcore but simultaneously incredibly cheap.
For example, I think the IUM has exactly zero administrators.
I think most of the discourse is about fees students pay, so $$$ for US vs free for Europe. When you see $38k for US vs $32k for UK then its a different problem.
I can see: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp... looks like the US is 20-30% more expensive than other developed countries but that isn't a huge difference.