Buildings are surprisingly expensive. ~50-75$ million (perhaps even more these days) gets you a pretty basic academic building (like a dorm). Fancy buildings with expensive contents like libraries and labs are substantially spendier.
I don't doubt your numbers. However, a dorm is an apartment building with students living it and maybe a room with some communal computers. You can walk two blocks from almost any $75 million dorm in the country and find an apartment building with students living in it. That apartment building didn't cost $75 million, or indeed anywhere close.
Sometimes excess is just excess.
As she starts her freshman year at the University of Maryland, Alyssa Evans will not be roughing it: She'll have a furnished single room with a double bed, private bathroom, cable and high-speed Internet. Her four-person suite has a full kitchen, a washer and dryer, a dining room table and black leather couches in the living room.
Her high-rise building has a game room with video games, poker and pool tables and flat-screen TVs, a rooftop deck, a pool and -- losing track here -- okay, and a big fitness center.
I am not sure that that's excessive. When I was in college, I shared a tiny room with a roommate. It was constantly loud, and I got nothing done. I ended up dropping out.
Since finding a real place to live (and a real job, of course), I've written a book and have over 100 open source projects in my github. Having a quiet, comfortable place to work probably contributed to that.
Giving people a reasonable place to live and study is not excess -- it should be mandatory. (Also, this stuff isn't that expensive. I live in a high-rise in downtown Chicago, not a cheap market, and facilities like this would not be very expensive when split between 4 people. It's not all that expensive for one person...)
The tanning beds are a bit much, but in general I don't see what's wrong with a nice dorm. Just because most of us put up with crappy living conditions as freshmen doesn't mean there's anything noble about it.
Biomedical buildings, which the new campus is full of, are insanely expense - on the order of $50 million/floor. Almost everything is close to a custom design to insure safety and research fidelity.
