It is a basic fact of American life, so widely known that it hardly needs to be said: College is getting ever more unaffordable. In survey after survey, Americans say that the cost of getting a degree just keeps rising.
But this basic fact of life is not a fact at all. In reality, Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. Since the 2014–15 school year, the cost of attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation, according to College Board data analyzed by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend a public institution.) The cost of attending a private university has risen in raw terms over the same time period, but is down 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s. “People have it in their heads that prices just keep going up, up, up,” Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. “And that’s actually not what’s happening.”
The confusion comes from the idiosyncratic way in which college is priced. Schools set a staggering official price that only a subset of the wealthiest students pay in full. Universities rely on that money to offer financial aid to low-income students; in effect, rich families subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. This means that there’s often a chasm between the published cost of attendance, or sticker price, and what people actually pay once financial aid is factored in, or the net price. Unfortunately, the eye-popping sticker prices tend to get the most attention. Within higher-education reporting, articles anticipating the arrival of the $100,000 year of college have become practically a genre unto themselves. “There’s massive problems in the higher-education sector—and we focus on all the wrong ones,” Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, told me. “We can’t stand the fact that the sticker price is so high despite the fact that nobody pays it.”
This pricing strategy took hold in the early 1980s. Since then, Levine has found, the sticker cost of attending a four-year public or private university—tuition plus fees and room and board—has almost tripled after adjusting for inflation. (The past four years, during which pandemic-induced inflation outpaced tuition growth, are an exception to the trend.) With this pace of increase, it’s no wonder that people think college prices are out of control.
But, as sticker prices have soared, so has the gap between them and the amount that people actually pay. The effect is most pronounced for low-income families, but middle- and upper-middle-income families receive substantial discounts too. In the 2021–22 school year, 82 percent of first-time, full-time undergraduates at public four-year schools received aid, as did 87 percent of those at private institutions. Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, Levine said.
Higher education might not be cheap—many families still get far less financial aid than they need, and the cost of attendance can rise unpredictably from year to year—but it is clearly getting cheaper. A mix of factors appear to be behind the trend. Increases to the federal Pell Grant have limited out-of-pocket costs for low-income students, David Deming, a political-economy professor at Harvard, told me. State appropriations have rebounded for public universities since the Great Recession. And colleges themselves appear to be offering more aid, which accounts for 70 percent of all discounts, Adam Looney, an economist at the University of Utah who wrote the Brookings study, told me.
Most of the researchers I spoke with predicted that net prices would keep falling over the next few years. The number of 18-year-old high-school graduates is expected to peak this year, followed by a long decline. This will reduce demand for college and force institutions to compete even harder with one another for applicants.
College is getting more affordable: That’s the good news. The bad news is that no one seems to have heard the good news. Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. think that universities charge everyone the same amount, according to a 2023 survey by the Association of American Universities. And, even as college costs fall, a recent poll found that 44 percent of people think that their state’s public-college tuition is likely to increase in the next year. (Twelve percent thought it would decrease, and the rest predicted no change.)
One study found that most high-achieving, low-income students chose not to apply to highly selective colleges with steep sticker prices. They opted instead for schools with lower sticker prices that ended up offering much less financial aid and thus costing more. (For low-income students who are admitted, elite universities, which draw on their enormous wealth to offer generous need-based aid, are almost always the most affordable option.) Another study found that low-income students were less likely to apply to a school when it raised its sticker price, even if those students would have qualified for a full ride based on their financial need. More unfortunate still, sticker shock can lead students to forgo college entirely.
In recent years, public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply; researchers attribute much of the decline to perceptions of college costs. More and more Americans are saying that a degree isn’t worth the investment, even though the so-called college wage premium still far outstrips the cost of attendance.
When researchers tell people how much more they stand to earn if they graduate from college, their study subjects are more likely to apply. Clearly, colleges should do a better job advertising their value proposition, even as they stress that most people don’t pay the full sticker price. But, given the opacity of the system, just telling people the difference between sticker and net prices has been shown to have little effect on whether those people attend college. Some research suggests that it would be more effective for schools to commit up front to one price for the full four years, something they are loath to do. “You have to fix knowledge, but then also make some promises to students that, not only is this real, but we’re not going to switch up on you after a year or two—which, to be frank, many universities currently do,” Zach Bleemer, an economics professor at Princeton, told me.
As colleges prepare for a tough enrollment picture, they can’t afford to push students away. And yet higher education’s weird pricing model is probably not going anywhere. After all, colleges haven’t found a better way to get the funding they need for financial aid. “I remember 30 years ago, people saying: ‘This can’t go on. They can’t keep doing this,’” Baum, the Urban Institute fellow, told me. “And they do. And they have to because if you charged everybody the same price, that price would simply be too high for many people.” In other words, it might not be long before we’re hearing about the rise of the $110,000 year of college—even as students are paying less than they do today.
