Here’s another set of considerations:
Student pays $8K for classes per semester and takes 5 classes. That’s about $1,600 per class. In undergraduate classes you can have up to 100 kids in a class for 100/200 level classes. 100 kids x $1,600 = $160,000 for calculus, english or american history 101 class? Prof teaches maybe 2 of these for a cost of salary and benefits of $40K per semester. Teaching Assts. do the grading and handle the break out classes. Looks like BS to me.
The housing is another boondoggle. They charge kids $2K per semester to live in a 15 x 15 dorm room with a roommate. That’s $8K per year for 225 feet of space and not including anything that they do in the summer sessions. A 3 bedroom apartment with 1,000 sq. feet off campus is $1,200 when you factor in utilities.
I am "junior faculty." My 100-level classes are capped at twenty students. I get no benefits -- unless you count a faculty parking sticker. I even pay for my own photocopying. I make the princely sum of $2,100/course/semester. Basically, for a fall/spring combo, I make $12,600.00 -- perhaps more, if I pick up a couple of the summer sessions that the tenured profs will not deign to teach, or pick up a night course for the adult continuing ed department. No TA for me -- Hell, no OFFICE for me. More often than not, I am treated as the TA for the upper levels.
By comparison, my tenured department "betters" teach one or two upper-level courses a semester, make $65K a year (with full bennies), and have their travel to various bullsh*t conferences subsidized, so that they can deliver obscure papers on the minutia of their specialty.
Your housing comment struck home with me. My daughter is in grad school in Austin. The tuition is not the problem, it’s the cost of housing. Even with a roommate her housing expenses are almost $1,000 month when you factor in utilities, internet and groceries. I live in fear of her final year when she will do six week clinical rotations all over Texas and need temporary housing. Typically these students pay weekly rates at a Comfort Inn type place.