>Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
This is exactly my point. And not just professor and admin salaries, the salaries and costs for everything.
It's not about "cutting corners", it's that if you compare the cost of something in the US to something in another country, the US usually is much more expensive; this doesn't mean the other country is cutting corners, it means the US is just too damn expensive.
I feel like that is circular logic. We started with the idea that the US is more expensive. That isn't an explanation for why it is more expensive. Why do we have so many more admins, and why do we pay them so well compared to median income, while Europe does not?