I don’t think it’s particularly complex.

They captured state houses and gutted state budgets for direct funding to universities. Simultaneously, democrats tried to make up the difference at the national level by pushing for and getting pell grants, which are dedicated grant funds. This means there’s a dedicated amount of federal funds on the table every year, which mitigates against the market forces that would otherwise push tuition prices back down.

Students are then encouraged to take personal loans to cover the manufactured shortfall. Students can’t discharge this in bankruptcy, which encourages bad lending practices.

Almost all of this is very normal cause and effect with plenty of analogous historical examples, so even if we the idiot people don’t get it, you can be pretty sure that our highly educated and wealthy elected officials knew exactly what would happen.

If this were all too confusing or complex to know the outcome, then at least some of the time we’d see benefit randomly go to the individual. But it doesn’t, ever.