Yes, making college more affordable and worthwhile by returning to its roots are not Democratic takes ....
What roots are those? The 1800's? Or the 1960's where kids got shot up at Kent State?
Colleges - modulo tuition costs - are 97% the same as they ever were. The 3% that is different is that they've cracked down on the ability of young kids to throw big ass fraternity parties.
The only way to make college more affordable is to increase the percentage of costs that are covered by tax dollars to levels that were prevalent when we attended. All these things you hand wring about are rounding errors.
Some costs have gone up because for many colleges inside a University, they have to do some serious refurbishing of their physical plants, and they need money for that. It's pretty wild walking around UofI. The English building is frozen in time in 1986, basically the same building just a bit more rough around the edges. Meanwhile the EE department moved out of Everett Lab, which was more functional and newer than the English building, and into a brand new building that is a freaky amazing LEED certified palace, with a state of the art cleanroom, etc... because there is outside funding. No 1986 grad from the English department is donating 50 million to do an overhaul. Funny thing is we'll probably need more English majors and all the EE will be done by AI