I went to Boston University for undergrad. When I went, tuition and board were 46k, which I thought was absurd. Fast forward a decade and it's 70k. At this rate, in less than 10 years it will be 100k per year. How does any of this make sense?!?!?!?
Some quick googling reveals that 52% of Boston University students receive financial aid, and the average award is about $30k per year.
What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else.
To be fair, this is what the system strives to. More and more schools are achieving an equitable balance (this is also why top unis are shifting towards need-based policies, as opposed to merit-based ones: your merit threshold for FA should be the threshold at which you accept students), but there are still kinks (IIRC students from farms are one notable demographic - their families tend to have high cashflow, because of the sheer value of the equipment and crops that they work with, even though their net income is incredibly low).
On the other hand you have schools like NYU that pretty much exist to strip their students of financial assets: they combine administrators who don't care for furthering their institutions as ones of education, but rather moneymaking tools, with financial aid offices so miserably incompetent that they presumably only exist so that they can claim to have such on marketing materials. (Apologies for the vitriol, but as a New Yorker I've always been ashamed of the school, and it embodies all too well so many of the things wrong with our higher education system.)
Not just students from wealthy families, but wealthy alums- the Ivies and other top schools have gigantic endowments. The annual returns on the endowments of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. are more than enough to fund tuition for every single undergraduate at those schools.
In 1997, it was roughly
$19,000 $4,000 $1,700 (the best plan) $1,000 etc.
I know that was 20 years ago, but even your $46k sounds outrageous to me. But someone who went to cornell 30 years ago would say the same about $25k of 1997.