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\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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, \u201cEnough.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not that $40,000 is the watershed,\u201d Elaine Tuttle Hansen, then Bates\u2019 president, told me at the time, \u201cbut somewhere there is a point. There has to be a point, and we have to worry about that.\u201d Clearly, that point wasn\u2019t $50,000 or even $90,000 because the <\/strong>all-in published price at Bates is $94,560. It was among 85 colleges that charged more than $90,000 for the 2025\u201326 academic year, according to data from the College Board.<\/p>\n But a major new threshold is at hand. With price increases already announced for the 2026-27 academic year, some of the nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This threshold has been been the subject of speculation for years. In 2019, The Hechinger Report<\/a>, an education news outlet, predicted the University of Chicago would be the first to pass $100,000 \u2014 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. \u201cIt\u2019s like turning 80,\u201d said Jon Boeckenstedt, who worked in admissions for more than 40 years before retiring last year. \u201cYou\u2019re just a day older than 79.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, other $90,000-plus colleges seem nervous about joining the six-figure club \u2014 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\u2019s also a gray area in so-called indirect expenses, where it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Brown\u2019s sticker price for 2026\u201327, 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<\/a> that the variation in student allowances across campuses isn\u2019t always explained by differences in the cost of living.<\/p>\n The price of a year of college has been steeply climbing ever since the parents of today\u2019s teenagers attended themselves. Tuition has increased by an average of 5.5 percent annually<\/a> since 1983, far outpacing inflation over that time. College leaders believe using the government\u2019s widely used Consumer Price Index to compare their tuition increases with inflation isn\u2019t fair, however, so higher ed developed its own inflation index<\/a>. But even by that measure, college costs are rising faster this decade<\/a> than they did during the last one \u2014 and for nine of the past 11 years, the increases have been larger than the Consumer Price Index.<\/p>\n Hand-wringing about college expenses has been a national pastime for at least the last half-century. A Newsweek cover in 1976 asked \u201cWho Needs College?\u201d in response to rising costs and declining employment. A decade later, a Time cover warned about \u201cHow Colleges Are Gouging U.\u201d Colleges suffer from what economist William Baumol and former Princeton president William Bowen called \u201ccost disease<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the idea that labor-heavy industries like higher education and health care can\u2019t 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\u2019s also a belief, mainly among fiscal conservatives, that the government has enabled higher tuition fees by making financial aid widely available.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no natural constituency for cost control on campuses,\u201d former Harvard president Larry Bacow once told me. \u201cUniversities compete by advertising their inefficiencies,\u201d including small classes, hands-on experiences, and luxurious amenities. When colleges put together their annual budgets, they start with what they\u2019re already doing, and then add more \u2014 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<\/a>. Only recently have campuses started to trim. Syracuse University, for example, announced plans to close 93 academic programs<\/a>; no students were majoring in 55 of them.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s ability to pay. This discounting strategy is similar to the coupons Macy\u2019s or Kohl\u2019s uses to lure shoppers into stores, knowing they\u2019ll spend something while they\u2019re there \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s $100,000 or $60,000, less meaningful to families who know they won\u2019t pay it \u2014 many increasingly view it as a suggested price that they can negotiate<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n \u2022 Barnard ($103,000) The precise number of schools in this price range won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n The pricing power of elite colleges is being tested by a new generation of families increasingly asking whether \u201c$100,000 colleges are really 33 percent better than $75,000 colleges,\u201d said Boeckenstedt, who headed up enrollment management at Oregon State and DePaul universities. \u201cColleges are selling an intangible product. You can\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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<\/a>. Boston University, for example, went from enrolling 20 percent of its freshman class through early decision in 2015 to 61 percent in 2024.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Claremont McKenna ($101,990)
\u2022 Colgate ($100,224)
\u2022 Duke ($103,975)
\u2022 Fordham ($102,188)
\u2022 Georgetown ($100,864)
\u2022 Harvey Mudd ($104,512)
\u2022 Haverford ($100,026)
\u2022 Smith ($102,226)
\u2022 Vassar ($101,051)
\u2022 Washington University in St. Louis ($102,260)
\u2022 Wesleyan ($101,030)<\/p>\n