I remember talking to some exchange students from Greece. There, college is 100% free (no debt). This is guaranteed by their constitution, and the system simply has to adapt. For example, nearly everyone lives with their parents, books are free because they have to be, etc.

More broadly, all of these costs seem like they could be reduced, if you had the proper incentives.

"Food and housing" comes to $900/month, living with parents. Are they suggesting students are eating $900 worth of food ($30/day!), or does this include some type of rent paid to their parents as well? I spend about $300/month on food, and I'm not even that stingy. Where does the extra $600 go?

The average high school in my country spends $4/student/day on providing school lunches. This includes labour costs - we're talking basically catering. Naively extrapolating this, we get $12/day ($360/month) for three proper meals a day.

For that matter, why are the dorms so expensive? Isn't it their land? Why don't they just lower the rents? $1200 food+rent implies $900 rent, which is obviously way more than you need to maintain a dorm room.

If they're living on campus, why do they need to spend $135/month on transportation anyway? Isn't the entire point that the place they need to be is right there? A bicycle works out to $50 one-time cost, plus let's say $10/year in repairs.

What's the $1000/year on books get them? Why can't the university simply use cheaper books? Wikipedia tells us: "East Bay has a student body of almost 15,000". That's $15 million per year. For that much money, couldn't you just buy up the rights for all the books you needed and put them into the public domain?

I just don't understand why you couldn't simply make the schools more effective.