'As high school seniors narrow their choices for college and parents gingerly peek at the price tags, they're asking themselves: How is it possible that colleges charge so much?

Colleges blame big tuition hikes on rising bills for fuel, health care benefits and salaries--and on the cost of keeping up with College X and its new rock-climbing wall and wired dorm. Businesses, though, face the same escalating costs and the same pressure to upgrade their products, but they don't raise their prices at anything like the same pace.

Since 1983 the cost of keeping colleges running has outpaced the Consumer Price Index by 48%, according to the Commonfund Institute, a nonprofit that compiles a higher-education price index. And the prices that colleges charge have climbed even faster. At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the tuition for students who don't qualify for a discount is up 270% in real terms in the past 25 years....'