Dive Brief:
- A Duke administrator says while it does cost $60,000 a year to attend, the school actually spends about $90,000 a year on each student.
- New construction accounts for a big chunk of the yearly cost, with $8,000 of what the school spends on each student going toward building and maintaining infrastructure.
- Another big part of the sticker price — about $20,000 — goes to supporting students on financial aid.
Dive Insight:
The fact that such a big part of the cost is being redistributed to other students as financial aid is part of the reason some call tuition "sticker prices" works of fiction. Indeed, there are nearly 200 schools where not one student pays the list price.
