tl;dr : Fix education with state funding, nationalized healthcare, and wall street regulation. The waste is not as bad as you think it is, and education really is expensive.

Education is not cheap. We think it should be cheap because in the past it has been thanks to government subsidies, institutional endowment funds, and the patronage of the very wealth. But the 30 years war on the middle class has eroded all of that and the result is rising costs.

Some things to consider :

1) Administrators, specifically top administrators, are highly educated (usually a second degree specifically in school admin) professionals at the end of their careers. They do a job similar to the CEO in scope to that of a CEO of a large corporation. And while pay rates for these people are out of hand, they are usually less out of hand for Universities than for profit enterprise. Even if executive pay where brought in line, and it should be, these people are still at the top of the professional ladder.

2) While it is true that bureaucracies tend to have some waste that could be trimmed, the alternative to a functional bureaucracy is the good old boy network. A bureaucracy, no matter how rage inducing to work with, makes it possible for everyone it serves to get things done (eventually). The alternative is smoky rooms and back room deals that exclude any not in the in crowd. This ranges from everything from getting proper maintenance for your dorm rooms to getting the classes you needed scheduled. Education benefits from economies of scale, and the larger you get the more your going to pay in overhead to maintain this organization. This structure invariables has some waste, and attempts to cut costs can be helpful, but ultimately your talking about tens of thousands of dollars in what can be billion dollar plus budgets.

3) The college experience isn't just education and research. Dorms and their upkeep cost money; students are really hard on dorms. Even an outsourced food service requires a working kitchen maintained by the school. The heat and AC and hot water need to be kept on and running. Campuses suck electricity from the grid far in excess of a typical home, thanks to all the computers in offices and TVs in every dorm room. Capital improvements are generally financed with debt, and the mortgage literally needs to be paid. A physical university is an expensive thing to run, even before you pay the staff and faculty.

4) Maintaining a standing body of experts (the faculty) is a huge fixed expense. And since they tend to be older, their health care coverage skews expensive. There might not be a lot of jobs for English teachers, but maintaining experts in things like science, medicine, law and business requires paying professors something approximating their wages in industry.

5) If pension funds seem excessive, it's because workers elsewhere have been screwed by the 401k scam; not because they are lavish compared with education and years of work done. Big stock market crashes in 1989, 2002, and 2008 have devastated pension funds and schools are left picking up the tab when their pension investments go bust. Likewise endowment funds meant to pay for physical upkeep have been badly hit. Often this means schools have been forced to draw down the principle on those funds to keep the lights on, further impairing their ability to hold the line on costs going forward.

6) 30 years ago businesses that wanted to ensure student came out ready to work would donate large sums of money and/or equipment to academic programs. Today, these businesses can use things like H1B visas to hire workers trained at the expense of other governments, and so donations and goods and cash are way down. But schools still need the equipment.

7) Education used to be a public good, subsidized quite heavily by the state. Most state schools started with grants of free land, and then enjoyed hefty support from the state (formulate funding). 30 years of education cuts are taking their toll.

What can be done :

1) Refund education at the state level, or consider some kind of federal support for state schools and community colleges. Big jumps in tuition like those seen in California are almost always the results of cuts to state education spending. Education really is expensive, but as a public good it is something that should be subsidized heavily with our tax dollars. This is not waste, its an investment in the future.

2) Nationalize healthcare. Medicare for everyone. Even a public option would bring down the costs of healthcare which have disproportionately affected universities.

3) Regulate wall street, and sue the banks to recover money lost on fraudulent investments. Three stock markets crashes in 23 years have depleted the pension and endowment funds schools use to self fund. When schools see slow, steady gains over decades they have more power to hold down costs instead of passing them on to students.