At Least 16 Colleges Will Cross the $100,000 Mark This Year

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty

In the fall of 2005, I visited Bates College, a small liberal-arts school 40 miles north of Portland, Maine, which that year had the distinction of being one of 75 colleges nationwide whose sticker price crossed the $40,000 threshold. I went there to report a story on how Bates set its tuition and fees because officials told me they agonized over whether they were nearing the point at which families would simply say, “Enough.”

“It’s not that $40,000 is the watershed,” Elaine Tuttle Hansen, then Bates’ president, told me at the time, “but somewhere there is a point. There has to be a point, and we have to worry about that.” Clearly, that point wasn’t $50,000 or even $90,000 because the all-in published price at Bates is $94,560. It was among 85 colleges that charged more than $90,000 for the 2025–26 academic year, according to data from the College Board.

But a major new threshold is at hand. With price increases already announced for the 2026-27 academic year, some of the nation’s most expensive colleges are now flirting with six figures for tuition, room, board, and required fees. When you add in miscellaneous expenses such as books and transportation that the federal government requires schools to factor into financial aid, the sticker prices of at least 16 schools, including Amherst College, New York University, and the University of Southern California, have already passed the $100,000 mark.

This threshold has been been the subject of speculation for years. In 2019, The Hechinger Report, an education news outlet, predicted the University of Chicago would be the first to pass $100,000 — and do so by 2025. Chicago came close last year with a sticker price of $98,301. For the academic year ahead, Chicago will indeed cross into six figures with total costs rising to $103,821. “It’s like turning 80,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, who worked in admissions for more than 40 years before retiring last year. “You’re just a day older than 79.”

Still, other $90,000-plus colleges seem nervous about joining the six-figure club — at least right away. As retailers and home sellers know, round numbers carry outsize significance, and colleges have more wiggle room in setting the bottom-line sticker price than it might appear. While tuition is relatively straightforward, the added housing and meal costs depend on the options students choose. There’s also a gray area in so-called indirect expenses, where it’s up to the school to estimate living costs, which can mean the difference between a sticker price that stays below six figures and one that crosses the line.

Brown’s sticker price for 2026–27, for instance, is just $16 shy of the six-figure mark: $99,984. It allocates precisely $2,878 for living expenses, compared with $2,500 at Harvard, $3,000 at Princeton, and $4,500 at the University of Illinois Chicago. Because students can borrow up to the official cost of attendance, colleges are caught between providing access to financial aid and keeping a handle on their published cost. And research shows that the variation in student allowances across campuses isn’t always explained by differences in the cost of living.

The price of a year of college has been steeply climbing ever since the parents of today’s teenagers attended themselves. Tuition has increased by an average of 5.5 percent annually since 1983, far outpacing inflation over that time. College leaders believe using the government’s widely used Consumer Price Index to compare their tuition increases with inflation isn’t fair, however, so higher ed developed its own inflation index. But even by that measure, college costs are rising faster this decade than they did during the last one — and for nine of the past 11 years, the increases have been larger than the Consumer Price Index.

Hand-wringing about college expenses has been a national pastime for at least the last half-century. A Newsweek cover in 1976 asked “Who Needs College?” in response to rising costs and declining employment. A decade later, a Time cover warned about “How Colleges Are Gouging U.” Colleges suffer from what economist William Baumol and former Princeton president William Bowen called “cost disease” — the idea that labor-heavy industries like higher education and health care can’t increase productivity as easily as other industries. (In general, it still takes one professor to teach 20 students, just as it did a hundred years ago.) There’s also a belief, mainly among fiscal conservatives, that the government has enabled higher tuition fees by making financial aid widely available.

“There is no natural constituency for cost control on campuses,” former Harvard president Larry Bacow once told me. “Universities compete by advertising their inefficiencies,” including small classes, hands-on experiences, and luxurious amenities. When colleges put together their annual budgets, they start with what they’re already doing, and then add more — new majors, faculty and staff, and buildings. Colleges have long bragged, for instance, about all the majors they offer. But on many campuses, half of students are enrolled in just ten academic majors. Only recently have campuses started to trim. Syracuse University, for example, announced plans to close 93 academic programs; no students were majoring in 55 of them.

College administrators often dismiss outrage over sticker prices by noting that, on most campuses, few students actually pay full freight. For decades, colleges have discounted tuition through merit scholarships, which are given out regardless of a family’s ability to pay. This discounting strategy is similar to the coupons Macy’s or Kohl’s uses to lure shoppers into stores, knowing they’ll spend something while they’re there — colleges use merit scholarships to entice students to enroll, since getting some tuition revenue is better than having an empty classroom seat or dorm bed.

Today, four in ten American colleges provide a discount on their sticker price to at least 80 percent of students without demonstrated financial need, according to work recently published by economist Phillip Levine of Wellesley College. That makes the advertised sticker price, whether it’s $100,000 or $60,000, less meaningful to families who know they won’t pay it — many increasingly view it as a suggested price that they can negotiate. At the vast majority of private colleges, Levine found that about three-quarters of freshmen receive merit aid, regardless of how wealthy their families are.

But most of the colleges approaching or crossing the $100,000 mark enjoy enough demand to avoid widely discounting tuition, even as they raise sticker prices year after year. Joining Amherst, Chicago, NYU, and USC in the six-figure club are mostly top-tier schools with low acceptance rates:

• Barnard ($103,000)
• Claremont McKenna ($101,990)
• Colgate ($100,224)
• Duke ($103,975)
• Fordham ($102,188)
• Georgetown ($100,864)
• Harvey Mudd ($104,512)
• Haverford ($100,026)
• Smith ($102,226)
• Vassar ($101,051)
• Washington University in St. Louis ($102,260)
• Wesleyan ($101,030)

The precise number of schools in this price range won’t be official until this fall, when colleges report their figures to the U.S. Department of Education, which typically releases the data nine months later.

The pricing power of elite colleges is being tested by a new generation of families increasingly asking whether “$100,000 colleges are really 33 percent better than $75,000 colleges,” said Boeckenstedt, who headed up enrollment management at Oregon State and DePaul universities. “Colleges are selling an intangible product. You can’t put education on a scale and compare it to a market rate. Families are essentially placing a bet that the investment will produce positive returns over time. The problem is that belief in those returns has weakened in recent years.”

An annual survey by Sallie Mae and Ipsos found last year that 79 percent of families with an income over $100,000 crossed a college off their list at some point because of high cost, while only 61 percent did so in the mid-2010s. Each year, as the sticker price of colleges goes up, the pool of institutions that families are willing to financially stretch for gets smaller.

Nowhere is that tension more visible than in early decision, where students apply early to a single school and agree to withdraw other applications if they get in. Early decision has become increasingly prevalent among top-ranked colleges in the last two decades for various reasons, including a desire by the institutions to lock in more of their class without competing for students in the scrum of regular decision. While many colleges with robust early-decision pools promise to meet financial need if a student is accepted, they don’t need to offer discounts to lure applicants in. As a result, early decision is a well-known strategy for wealthier students looking for a way into selective schools in exchange for paying full price. At some institutions, the share of students enrolled through early decision is approaching 70 percent. Boston University, for example, went from enrolling 20 percent of its freshman class through early decision in 2015 to 61 percent in 2024.

But there is evidence that families are becoming less willing to play the game as price tags reach $100,000. While the overall number of applications to colleges continue climbing as students apply to more schools, those filed in the early-decision round are beginning to lag compared with early action — which has similar deadlines but isn’t binding — and regular decision, according to data from the Common App, the single online application now used by more than a thousand institutions.

Melissa and David, a couple in Atlanta, told me the consultant they hired to help with their daughter’s college search advised against placing a single bet on early decision for financial reasons. With Sophie’s academic stats (3.96 GPA, 12 AP courses, 35 out of 36 on the ACT), she and her parents knew she a good chance of getting into her state’s public flagships: Georgia Tech or the honors college at the University of Georgia. Both would be tuition-free because of the state’s generous lottery-funded scholarship program.

“Sure, she’d have a better shot at Wake Forest or Brown by going early decision, but that means $90,000-plus when we might have options at home that were close to free,” David told me. Sophie was indeed accepted to Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia and applied regular decision at Brown and Wake Forest (sticker price, nearly $99,000). In April, Sophie put a deposit down at Georgia Tech. She remains on the wait list at Brown. While Melissa feels like an Ivy would be tough to turn down if Sophie is accepted, David is more focused on the finances. “It’d be hard for me to find enough value in $90,000-plus just because it’s an Ivy compared to free tuition at Tech,” he told me.

Often, the brand-name schools getting skipped over — whether students turn down an acceptance or don’t apply in the first place — sit one tier down from the most selective institutions. This category includes liberal-arts colleges like Skidmore and Connecticut College and research universities like Syracuse and Brandeis, schools that once had more pricing power in the marketplace.

Lisa, a mother of two in Michigan who graduated from Kenyon College in the early 2000s, assumed she’d stretch financially for her oldest if he wanted the same kind of small-school experience. Her son, Ben, is a high-school senior this year and fell hard for Hamilton College in New York, where next year’s sticker price is $95,250. To figure out how much need-based aid they might qualify for, Lisa used Hamilton’s net-price calculator, which the federal government requires colleges to display on their websites. The result: zero. “I thought, That must not be right,” she told me. But it was. When the acceptance from Hamilton arrived, it didn’t include any financial assistance.

Lisa and her husband had saved about $90,000 for college, enough to cover roughly one year at Hamilton. “We figured we would eat ramen noodles and kind of take from retirement and sacrifice,” she said. But Ben was also accepted into the honors program at the University of Michigan, where the annual cost for an in-state student would be about half as much as at Hamilton. With ambitions to eventually earn a doctorate in physics, Ben didn’t want to start graduate school already in debt. “Ninety thousand dollars is just an astronomical number,” Lisa said. He chose Michigan, where he’ll start as a freshman this fall. Meanwhile, Lisa plans to approach the college search differently with their daughter, who is a sophomore in high school: “We’ll pay a lot closer attention to price and merit aid before she tours, applies, and falls in love.”

The consequences of this shift in consumer behavior are now starting to show up in one of the metrics colleges watch most closely: yield rates, or the percentage of accepted students who eventually enroll. Brian Christensen, a vice-president at Human Capital Education, an enrollment consulting firm that works with colleges, told me that among the company’s clients with the most expensive sticker prices and the highest rankings, yield rates fell by 3.5 percentage points this spring for students without any financial need. “Chasing wealthier students has become increasingly difficult for institutions,” Christensen said.

Which raises a broader question: If so few students actually pay full price, why keep charging it? A handful of colleges have experimented with what’s known as a “tuition reset,” lowering their published price closer to what many families actually pay after discounts. But the strategy hasn’t worked as well as many had hoped because colleges often don’t make up in new enrollment what they lose in revenue from families who previously would have paid more than the reset price.

“Colleges are stuck,” Boeckenstedt told me. “They irrationally raised tuition too fast for too long, to a point where their hands are tied.”