People walk through Duke Chapel on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, US
Jim R. Bounds Bloomberg | Getty Images
The annual cost of attending more than a dozen colleges is now six figures, after accounting for tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation and other expenses.
For the 2026-27 academic year, 16 institutions — including Duke, Georgetown, New York University and the University of Chicago — have a sticker price of more than $100,000, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC from The Princeton Review’s upcoming “The Best 392 Colleges” list. Others, such as Brown University, Northwestern and Pepperdine, cost more than $99,000.
As more schools cross the $100,000 threshold, others will follow, according to Jeff Selingo, author of “Dream School.”
“We just keep going up and it doesn’t stop,” he said.
“We’ve been looking at this six-figure price for a long time, and now we’re here — and for a lot of people that sounds important,” Selingo said.
Some students and their families have reached breaking point, he added, and as a result, small liberal arts colleges have begun to lose out to larger — and less expensive — public schools. There are a group of institutions that were able to raise the price without any problem, now they are finding students and families backing down,” said Selingo.
The high cost of college has caused some students to leave private schools as many students question the return on investment, Selingo said.
“The cost of college is deplorable — no doubt about that,” said Robert Franek, executive editor of the Princeton Review, “and with sticker prices for schools exceeding $100,000, paying for college seems more difficult.”
An Ivy League exception
These days, only the Ivy League and some of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities can afford price increases without scrutiny, Selingo said. “Harvard, Yale and Amherst will always have more than enough people who will pay anything to go there,” he said.
But many of these top schools also directly address the issue of college affordability by offering financial aid packages, and some cover all costs for low-income families.
Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the few that are “not taught” for undergraduates with family incomes of up to $200,000.
With the rising cost of college comes a discount
Even when the college tab seems increasingly unaffordable, students and their parents rarely pay the full price, several reports show.
More and more schools are reducing tuition fees,” said Selingo.
Often in the form of well-deserved aid, the average tuition discount for first-time, full-time students at private colleges was as high as 57% for the 2025-26 academic year, according to a recent report by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, a group that represents business and finance officers at more than 1,700 US colleges and universities.
“This means that for every dollar of primary education and the fees that these institutions would have charged, they provide a government grant amounting to 57 cents for first-time students,” said the report.
In fact, “the higher the school’s sticker price, the more generous the school will be in offering scholarship awards to students who hope to enroll,” Franek said.
At 16 schools with six-figure tags, the average grant money awarded to needy first-year students in 2026-27 ranged from $42,000 to $79,000, on average, The Princeton Review found.
“The data tell a clear story: Don’t rule out a private college because of the sticker price, because the odds are pretty good that you’ll get a federal grant from that school,” said Kara Freeman, president and CEO of NACUBO, in a statement.
A separate study by education lender Sallie found that families pay nearly half of college costs through income and savings. Tuition, grants and student loans make up the bulk of the rest, according to the annual How America Pays for College report.
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