Dive Brief:
- Students at four-year colleges are paying less for tuition now than they did six years ago when adjusted for inflation, according to new research from the think tank Brookings Institution.
- The average cost of tuition after scholarships and other discounts, known as net tuition, has decreased since 2019-20 — “in stark contrast to the public’s perception,” wrote Phillip Levine, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and author of the report. That held true for students across income levels and institution types.
- Net tuition has typically fallen most for students with family income at $45,000, the lowest income level Levine tracked. For that cohort, the cheapest net tuition on average — $4,600 in the current academic year — is at the country’s wealthiest private colleges, which Levine noted enroll relatively smaller shares of low-income students.
Dive Insight:
Key to public perceptions of higher education’s value is the price paid to attain a degree. But assessing college prices is no straightforward matter. While sticker prices often garner headlines, the actual costs of college at many institutions are obscured by discounting via institutional and other financial aid.
A survey conducted in 2024, for example, found that 77% of respondents thought college was too expensive. But most people surveyed overestimated how much higher ed actually costs at public institutions.
Levine’s research specifically addressed this disparity.
“Rising sticker prices are noticed because that is the price that is most easily identified,” Levine said in a Brookings post this month. “But it is important to recognize that few students pay that price, and those who do typically have at least reasonably high incomes.”
To assess net tuition prices, Levine looked at net price calculators that colleges operate per federal rules and proprietary data from a nonprofit he founded. He noted the calculators can sometimes contain inaccuracies and other limitations.
The data showed broadly falling prices after accounting for inflation. At public flagships and R1 universities, for example, inflation-adjusted net tuition between 2019-20 and 2025-26 dropped 9.6% to $24,400 for students with a family income of $85,000, according to Levine’s analysis. At private universities with very large endowments, net tuition for that group fell 30.8% to $10,800 for 2025-26.
For students with a family income of $45,000, inflation-adjusted net tuition fell by double digit percentages across every type of four-year institution during that six-year period. Those students saw the biggest drop at private universities with very large endowments, where the decline was 28.1%.
A growing number of institutions in that category — including Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology — offer free tuition to students whose families make below a given income threshold.
But Levine noted the “relatively small number of lower-income students” who enroll at the highly selective institutions with the wealthiest endowments. That means fewer are able to take advantage of the tuition price.
In contrast, students from the lowest earning households paid a net tuition of $15,400 at public flagships and R1 institutions, a roughly 15% drop from six years prior.
Even those with family income of $250,000 saw net price declines, typically in single digits. At private, tuition-dependent colleges, where competition is often intense, net prices for that income group fell 15.8% from 2019-2020 to $37,900 in 2025-26, according to Levine’s analysis.
