When will the first university or college charge $100,000 per year?

When will the first American college or university charge $100,000 or more to attend? What might that mean for higher education?

I first asked this question back in 2018.  I wanted to use that psychologically important six figure price as a milestone to come, a signal event in the history of rising published institutional charges.  In that post I offered a forecast. Today I’d like to check in on that post, as I’ve been doing ever since (for examples: 2021, 2022).

To recap and summarize: I was trying to estimate when the first American campus would crack $100,000 for total cost of attendance for a year of full time undergraduate schooling.  That means the combination of tuition and fees, plus room and board.  It includes only published prices, not accounting for discounts through scholarships etc.

For example, here’s the official, published total cost of attendance for the University of Southern California, with a helpful breakdown:

Amherst College helpfully adds some further expenses:

Looking for such data, I selected some or all of the most expensive institutions, checked out the rate by which their prices rose, and estimated that one would breach six figures by the 2029-2030 academic year.  Last year I revisited these Most Expensive Universities (MEUs) and found several getting pricier more quickly.   Two, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania looked like they would reach six figures by 2026.

Let’s check in on those MEUs in this year of 2023.

Here’s the list of leading contenders I assembled previously, updated with their official costs for the upcoming (2023-2024) academic year, re-ranked in descending price order:

USC $90,921

Harvey Mudd College 89,115

University of Chicago 89,040

Wellesley College 89,091

University of Pennsylvania 89,028 ($88,892 for living off campus)

Amherst College 88,599 (assuming the insurances aren’t waived)

Tufts University 88,300 (without health insurance, as noted)

Northwestern University 87,804

Dartmouth College 87,793

Brown University 84,828

There are others in this bracket.  Cal Tech is definitely towards the top with an annual charge of $86,886.  Columbia University’s total cost comes in at $85,967.   Claremont McKenna College prices in at $86,500.  Duke University: $84,517.   Stanford University: $84,683. Sarah Lawrence College publishes a direct charge of $81,224. Harvard University slides just under the 80K bracket with $79,450.

(For simplicity’s sake, I’ve left off estimates of non-billable personal costs, as well as extra fees levied on first-year students.  I’m also using on-campus housing figures, as the host campus is responsible for those, unlike for off-campus living.  I include books, as those are both necessary class costs, and also amenable to open education resource amelioration.)

In my previous posts on this topic I worked from a 4% annual price increase.  If we apply that to USC, they cross over the $100K barrier in four academic years:

2023-2024 $90,921

2024-2025 94,558

2025-2026 98,340

2026-2027 102,274

Harvey Mudd also crosses in that academic year, just a hair behind:

2023-2024 $89,115

2024-2025 92,680

2025-2026 96,387

2026-2027 100,242

Let’s see how all eighteen of those campuses fare over the 2020s:

Institution2023-20242024-20252025-20262026-20272027-2028USC90,9219455798340102273106364Harvey Mudd College89,1159267996386100242104251University of Chicago89,0409260196305100157104164Wellesley College89,0919265496360100215104223University of Pennsylvania89,0289258996292100144104150Amherst College88,599921429582899661103648Tufts University88,300918329550599325103298Northwestern University87,804913169496898767102718Dartmouth College87,793913049495698755102705Cal Tech86,886903619397597734101644Claremont McKenna College86,500899609355897300101192Columbia University85,967894059298196701100569Brown University84,82888221917499541999236Stanford University84,68388070915939525699067Duke University84,51787897914139507098872Sarah Lawrence College81,22484472878519136595020Harvard University79,45082628859338937092945

(I fudged cents manually, mostly cutting them off, because I couldn’t figure out how to handle that in Google Sheets.)

2026-2027 seems to be the breakthrough year with five institutions crossing over.  Next, academic year 2027-2028 sees six figures as par for the course for this MEU group.

Now, that 4% back-of-the-envelope number is out of date.  Inflation famously or notoriously has taken off over the past two years, and that definitely impacts college and university economics. The inflation rate has cooled off this week to 4.9% (Bureau of Labor Statistics), but was obviously higher for a time.  Some of those higher costs are baked into present pricing (think energy, food service, health care, and also staff cost of living) and so will goose up charges for the near future.

Let’s see what happens if published prices go up by a rough and simple 5%:

Institution2023-20242024-20252025-20262026-20272027-2028USC90,92195467100240105252110515Harvey Mudd College89,1159357098249103161108319University of Chicago89,0409349298166103074108228Wellesley College89,0919354598222103133108290University of Pennsylvania89,0289347998153103061108214Amherst College88,5999302897680102564107692Tufts University88,3009271597350102218107329Northwestern University87,8049219496803101644106726Dartmouth College87,7939218296791101631106712Cal Tech86,8869123095791100581105610Claremont McKenna College86,5009082595366100134105141Columbia University85,967902659477899517104493Brown University84,828890699352298199103108Stanford University84,683889179336398031102932Duke University84,517887429317997838102730Sarah Lawrence College81,22485285895499402698728Harvard University79,45083422875939197396571

2025-2026 is the new breakthrough year in this model.  A majority of MEUs join the six figure club the following year.

What does this mean for higher education?

In a sense all of this data-gathering and modeling doesn’t matter very much.  $100,000 is an arbitrary number, no more important than $99,999 or $100,001. I’m also picking on a very, very small slice of American colleges and universities.  The community college sector, for example, is far larger in number of institutions and educates a massively bigger number of students.  Further, it’s not exactly shocking news to reveal that higher education’s sticker prices rise.

Yet I do think this probe could be of use.  To begin with, the switchover from five to six figures may prove to be psychologically or culturally significant. We do tend to pay extra attention to such numbers, like the year 2000 millennium or numbering COVID dead by increments of hundreds of thousands, then millions. To the extent the first campus to cross this arbitrary milestone becomes a cultural moment, I hope these posts can prepare some of us.  Further, I expect at least some administrators to be aware of the potentially bad press for that milestone, and will take steps to make it look less frightening; we can anticipate such steps now.

There’s another reason to pay attention to these MEUs. They tend to draw outsized attention both within and outside of the academic ecosystem.  Their reputations loom large within a very calibrated institutional hierarchy. How they handle price increases, and how society responds to them, will be the subject of study from other colleges and universities.

More deeply, I think such staggeringly high sticker prices illuminate the real pricing model of higher ed, one based on combining those fees with deep discounts.  I expect discount rates to grow in tandem with the published prices, perhaps reaching 75% by the decade’s end. This clearly reveals the massive disparities of American income and wealth; indeed, one could see our deepening discount+rising prices model is a carefully structured expression of living in a post-Piketty world.

Once again I must hedge this discussion. These are crude, first-order extrapolations.  A whole galaxy of events can throw them off target: escalating war in Ukraine, which helped trigger inflation; a financial crisis; economic and/or political crises between the United States and China; political chaos involving the 2024 election; climate disasters; etc.  Within higher education administrators have options and strategies which could take them in different directions.

For now, I hope I’ve inspired some discussion.  I’ll check back on this six figure forecast a year from now.

(daring odometer photo by Alan Levine)