US college costs just keep climbing. And the increase is pushing the annual price for the upcoming academic year at Ivy League schools toward yet another hold-on-to-your-mortarboard mark: $90,000.
Full costs at elite private colleges already stretch well into the $80,000s, or upward of $320,000 for four years. At places like Brown University, the cost of attendance (tuition, room, board and fees) is almost $85,000, well above what the typical US household earns. Financial aid, in the form of grants, scholarships, loans and work-study programs, closes the gap for many.
But as the high-school class of 2023 anxiously awaits admissions decisions in coming weeks, even those wealthy enough to pay full freight are contending with sticker shock. Tuition has been rising so briskly for so long that the value proposition of college can start getting murky, said Beth Akers, an economist who focuses on higher education.
“At some point, that math stops working out,” said Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “We get to a place where these degrees are just no longer worth it.”