re: I don’t get why it is more costly for colleges to educate students now vs the 70s/80s

Administrative bloat is the main cause for the increase in tuition. Programs and administrators specifically created to oversee other administrators and programs.

The genesis of this is twofold: first, the desire to attract students by making college something it doesn’t need to be - a social engineering/community building/entertainment experience. Second, guaranteed streams of revenue (student loans) to pay for all of that, which guarantees its expansion.

Faculty salaries are secondary to this. They are high, but concentrated only on the few professors at the top of the pyramid. Adjunct faculty picks up a sizable portion of the teaching at many universities, and you might be surprised at how little they make. Think $5,000 per semester course. And that’s the personnel model that more and more colleges are adapting. Farm out cheap labor to temporary faculty teaching (in many cases) online courses, and keep expanding programs to make your campus Disney World-like.

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Professors make BANK. Get sabbaticals. Get a cushy schedule. Get actual tenure (makes what K12 teachers get look amateur).

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Full professors make good money. Making full professor can take anywhere from 12-20 years (7 years for promotion & tenure plus 5-10 years as an Associate with demonstration of increased output every year) and isn't guaranteed at all. It's not an automatic raise. Sabbaticals are unpaid, unless the university offers some outstanding compensation. Typically faculty who go on sabbatical apply for external (think national or international grant-funding sources) high-level research funding which supplements their loss of income from the year off. When faculty go on sabbatical they are supposed to research while filling out required administrative reports for what they did on sabbatical. I don't know what the K-12 tenure process looks like, but a ton of work over seven years goes into one's ability to be offered tenure at universities.

A dirty thing going on right now is that denial of tenure for faculty at Ivies is increasing because administrators know they can get 6-7 years out of a candidate then move on to another because there's a steady & strong pool of candidates waiting to have the school's name on their resume.

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My advisor at Auburn made $250k/year and took an all expenses paid trip to Europe every year for “research.” This wasn’t a week trip. This was like 6 weeks. Had a 2/1 teaching load. Was tenured and published every few years.

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That sounds amazing! A 2-1 teaching load sounds great! And practically unattainable for faculty nowadays. That pretty much can only happen at an R1 institution with a full professor or if the faculty member goes into administration (Provost, Dean, etc.). Your advisor must be (or was) a very high-level producer of research to the field, which sounds like the university wanted to keep that up by requiring fewer classes. Which isn't really 2-1 load but probably a 3-3 with course releases for research. The dean or provost could rescind such releases to meet the needs of the university, but probably didn't because as long as the faculty member is producing top-level research and bringing in external grants.

Professors are not what is costing more colleges and universities to educate students. The growing gap between what universities spend on administrative costs vs budget on faculty + instruction is a better place to examine.