58 colleges this year charged more than $50,000 for room, board and tuition, up from just five last year, according to a Chronicle analysis.

The jump surprises me a little. I’ve always just eyeballed the cost of college at plus/minus $50,000, mostly because sticker price doesn’t factor in travel (hello, plane tickets) or textbooks (goodbye, summer earnings). To see that so many crossed the threshold at once, during a down year, is interesting (note: many tuitions/rooms/boards were set before Wall Street started its spiral.)

There’s a lot of talk about what the price tag means psychologically.  As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t factor in travel or textbooks, which easily add up to a few thousand a year, making the price most students pay higher than advertised. Similarly, financial aid and grants can make the price much lower than advertised.

But there does have to be a ceiling, the experts seem to agree. They’re guessing it’s $60,000. Maybe it’s a sign of the times, and that number will sound completely normal, but to me $50,000 sounds like a plateau more than $60,000. Thoughts on it stopping/slowing any time soon?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 1:52 am and is filed under University finances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.