If we don't "free market dogma" applying to college major decisions, then we've got to figure out how to make it so choosing humanities is not signing up for a near-lifetime of debt with no practical way of discharging it.
If there is any discipline for which it make absolutely, utterly no sense that college today is so many multiples more expensive than it was 50 years ago, it's the humanities. Have books gotten more expensive? No. A huge chunk of the material is public domain, so it's not licensing problems. We shouldn't need more administrators, we should need massively fewer what with computers taking care of all the tedious paperwork. The teachers involved are making maybe a couple of times more than what they would have 50 years ago, inflation adjusted, and a great deal of them are making less than they did back then, as associate professors. Where is all the money going?
It's complicated? And depends on if you're talking about elite private universities, middle-tier state schools, for-profit schools, etc.
Most classes of schools have larger administrations: some are just bloat, of course, but others are managing demand for increased student services, greater requirements on compliance for federal grants, increased desire to woo wealthy private donors, etc.
Virtually all classes of universities are trying to expand their facilities and update or maintain their physical plants; this becomes an arms race when students are paying full freight--who will pay in the high five figures yearly to attend some place with run-down buildings?
Elite universities have sharply expanded financial aid as they have broadened their student bodies beyond the already wealthy.
For-profit schools charge what they can and direct the extra to shareholders, propped up by federal student loans; this has led to a wide range of abuses.
Finally, we must not forget that there has been a major effort to defund public higher education. Rather than casting a university degree as something that other citizens benefit from, it's depicted as purely a private good that students themselves should pay for. See "Unmaking the Public University" by Newfield. In this case the "higher tuition" is not new money to the university, but shifting the burden of paying for the education from society to the individual.
That problem is fairly limited to one large chunk of one continent. Other countries have this figured out, there is no reason why working solutions could not be copied from elsewhere. NIH is a thing outside of IT.
Supply and demand analysis works on both free and non-free markets, and it works as an explanation for why humanities degrees are in decline.
"Free market dogma" is the religious claim that the point where the supply and demand curve meet is always better (in some typically convoluted ideological sense) when the market in question is unregulated. I don't see that claim in the GP post.
