More Than a Dozen Colleges Are Quietly Crossing the $100,000 Mark This Year |
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........