One of the most frustrating things about college planning is trying to estimate the cost. Net price calculators are a good start, but College Tuition Advisory Services (CTAS) dives deep into the data to provide detailed college cost estimates tailored to your situation. They also publish an informative blog that frequently highlights the costs of various colleges — it’s definitely worth exploring! Our friends at CTAS will be joining us for a great Webinar on Thursday, March 3, 2022. (Learn more about CTAS and the Webinar here.)

One of the fascinating — or maybe just frustrating! — things about net cost is that you just don’t know how much aid a school is likely to provide. This means that some highly selective schools are actually affordable, while other schools with less name recognition end up being surprisingly costly. CTAS breaks it all down in their post predicting the Top 20 Most Expensive Colleges — reprinted here with their permission.

by Julian Treves, College Tuition Advisory Services (CTAS)

We hear a lot about list-price tuition, but which colleges cost the most per student ON AVERAGE?

While news articles on high-end college prices usually focus on the full stated Cost of Attendance (COA), the more relevant issue pertaining to undergraduate program revenue generation and the overall student body is how much the average student pays to attend. Because of discounting and other aid, we of course know that the stated COA is not a good measure of the average price a program charges. To our knowledge, the highest announced COA in 2021 is the University of Chicago, which asks for $81,531 from its highest paying students but does not top the list of highest student spend. And we know it can’t be measured by Net Price because of the significant number of students excluded from the calculation, something which especially affects reporting by expensive schools, with their large share of well-heeled students paying full prices.

Average Net Cost clears many of the metrics’ flaws away and permits ranking of which colleges generate the highest average net spending by their students. Our projection of the most expensive school in the U.S. came as a bit of a surprise: Wake Forest, at $62,867. 

First the Top 20 and then some comments

The 20 can be grouped into several categories.

The Glamorous Triad: Boston University, NYU, USC

Previously, we have pointed to four private schools as being among the largest U.S. undergraduate programs by revenue: NYU, Cornell, Boston University and USC. Benefitting from their location in glamorous global cities, three of those schools - BU, NYU, and USC - show up again with high average pricing. By tuition revenue, NYU is the largest program in the U.S. and manages to both enroll the largest number of students on our list and also to charge close to the most. The CTAS algorithm calculating these projections takes into account individual college data and economic data, but intentionally does not reflect real-time news, such as NYU seeing record application numbers after going test optional. So this 2021 projection could be viewed as unduly pessimistic. As you will see in the table farther down, NYU charged an Average Net Cost of $60,413 in 2018/19 and now has even more demand tailwind on its side. We wouldn’t be surprised to see NYU top out and eventually report figures showing it to be the most expensive US college in 2021/22 when the dust settles. (Wake Forest has been test-optional the last few application cycles so it does not benefit from this new tailwind.)

Mid-Size Success Stories: Santa Clara, Wake Forest, Wash U…

The top 20 list also includes a set of mid-size private schools across the country, each with different market positions. Washington University flies a bit under the radar but its reported figures show strong enrollment and demand in the last half decade, allowing the school to enjoy a positive feedback loop: pushing through above average price increases while simultaneously reducing its already-low admissions rates and increasing its yield. The precarious demographic and financial situation of a flotilla of small private colleges in the Great Plains may bolster Wash U’s strong position in coming years.

Santa Clara is another interesting business success story. Taking advantage of the fact that California state schools take in exceptionally few out-of-state students (5% of the state’s total undergraduates), it enrolls approximately 40% of its students from out-of-state. Especially popular with other western states, with sizable recruiting in Washington, Oregon and Hawaii, Santa Clara also attracts students from across the country, with Illinois and Colorado well represented. If you want to live in the Bay Area and be close to the Silicon Valley scene, applying there is a much better bet than the big California public schools, such as UC-Berkeley, with their punishingly small number of out-of-state slots.

Our most expensive school, Wake Forest, has in some ways a similar profile as Santa Clara, although it is more selective. Sitting in the booming Carolina Research Triangle, it offers entry into a vibrant economic area and has used its various attractions to recruit successfully across the nation, with significant out-of-state enrollment not just from neighboring states but from the northeast – Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey – and even from California. Wake Forest’s success comes across multiple dimensions. It has raised prices far faster than the national average (increasing its Average Net Cost from approximately $39,000 in 2009 to the current figure), has become more selective (down to a 29% admissions rate in the 2018 cycle) and is registering a higher yield, all the while increasing its overall undergraduate body size by a moderate amount.

Schools like Tufts, Boston College, Georgetown and Brown (the sole Ivy League appearing), round out this list. All parlay specific strengths into market success.

Small Arts Schools: RISD, Berklee Music, Pratt… 

RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) routinely charges at the very top of the Net Cost distribution, but it is only one of several small arts-focussed institutions that provide pricey but very desirable arts-centered education for their niche audience. New York’s School of Visual Arts, the Berklee College of Music and CalArts all make our Top 20 list, but other schools, such as the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Manhattan School of Music, narrowly missed the Top 20 list.

Other Small Private Colleges in top 20 Cost

Other members of our list include a brace of small private California colleges (Pitzer and Harvey Mudd), Bucknell and the New School in Manhattan.

Of course, the Net Cost paid by individual college students falls along a curve dictated by family finances, academics and demographics. The schools listed work with different curves and prioritize different objectives. But a school’s Average Net Cost illustrates market strength and revenue-generating ability. While many of the colleges on the list are academically distinguished, names such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, with their endowment-fueled need-blind standards, do not appear. There’s no doubt that Harvard (with a projected ‘21/22 Average Net Cost of $44,863) could significantly raise its prices if it changed its philosophy, but it and these other three schools limit their undergraduate revenues to further their overall organizational mission and long-term reputation. The Top 20 shown here illustrates schools pursuing a different objective and more accurately presents average student spending, undistorted by confusing college price discrimination.