I tried to check if that was true, but couldn't find much historical tuition data online. What little I did find showed that tuition adjusted for inflation has been increasing fairly steadily for over 100 years, and I didn't really see any change in the rates between before government loans and after.

Maybe if I had found data for a wide range of schools instead of just a couple of hard to get into schools there would have been a more noticeable effect.

Clearly nothing to do with inefficient administration, then. Here in Australia, where a friend's wife works as the PA for the Dean in one of our foremost universities, and I know numerous lecturers, some of whom are moving overseas for better opportunities (in Southeast Asia of all places!), the faculty-members-over-beer perspective is largely that the universities are head-in-sand about AI and about to become far less relevant. IMHO MIT OCW is great, we need more of that, and more mini-courses.