david skorton is the president of the cornell university. >> wonderful to be here.atulations on all you're doing. >> thank you so much. i am thrilled to have you because this university is going to be something to talk about. but the big front and center issue right now for so many of us is the expense of college and the steady increase that we're seeing for many american familieses. cornell runs about $52,000 a year. why has it become so expensive and keeps getting more expensive every year? what are we paying for? >> there's a whole bunch of reasons for it. technology is certainly one of them. there's also this concept that people always want the best of everything. we want our students, our children, to have extracurricular activities and facilities and residence halls that are good. there's another concept, and that is that we like the relatively small student/teacher ratio, which means it's very, very hard to increase productivity if you have a human-intensive industry. some of the market forces don't work that well in some of the campuses. for example, the ove