A $100,000 sticker price says very little about the real cost — and value — of college

Reports that the total cost of attendance at 15 American colleges and universities now exceeds $100,000 per year have generated a chorus of complaints.

“You do the math,” declared the host of a recent CNN panel . “That is nearly $500,000 for a bachelor’s degree.” The “spiraling cost,” she added, begs “the question, is higher education worth it anymore?”

One panelist called higher education one of “the most federally subsidized institutions in our economy, and the worst value for the consumer.” Another wondered how students would repay more than $120,000 in loans.

This increasingly common narrative creates a deeply misleading impression about what most students pay, how much they borrow, and the value of a college degree.

Although a majority of the roughly 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. are private, most undergraduates attend public institutions where, the College Board reports , annual in-state tuition and fees average $11,950 at four-year institutions and $4,150 at two-year institutions. At private nonprofit four-year institutions, tuition and fees average $45,000.

Most students do not pay the sticker price; what really matters is the amount they pay after subtracting financial aid. That amount has been falling. At public four-year institutions, net tuition and fees , adjusted for inflation, have declined from $4,450 in the 2012 to 2013 academic year to $2,300 last year. The average private nonprofit tuition has declined from $19,810 in 2006 to $16,910 today.

The total cost of attendance , including housing, room, board and other expenses, is about $30,990 at in-state public four-year institutions and $65,470 at private nonprofits. But the more than 85 percent of undergraduates who receive financial aid pay much less, and some pay nothing.

At the 15 schools now charging $100,000, average discounts for students with financial needs range from 41 percent to 78 percent. For many students from middle- and low-income families, that makes these institutions even more affordable than most public universities.

Nor is the typical bachelor’s degree recipient drowning in debt. More than half of recent graduates finished school with no education debt. Among the 47 percent who borrowed, the average debt was $29,560 , far less than the average cost of a new car . Median debt among Ivy League graduates was even less, ranging from $10,450 at Princeton to $21,500 at Columbia.

For most students, college is a terrific investment, although returns vary significantly by institution and major. According to a 2025 report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Work Force, “prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree earn 70 percent more at the median than workers with a high school diploma alone and face much lower unemployment rates (2.9 percent and 6.2 percent), respectively.”

A 2025 Brookings report concluded that “the financial return to a bachelor’s degree has not declined.” Over their careers, college graduates earn two to three times more than high school graduates. “After accounting for tuition and lost earnings” the study adds, “the typical college graduate breaks even by age 26 or 27 and gains more than $1 million over a lifetime.”

The greatest financial risk for most students is not paying exorbitant tuition but leaving college without a degree. Only 61 percent of the students who started college in 2019 earned a credential within six years. Students in the lowest income quintile had only a 50 percent completion rate.

These students incur borrowing and opportunity costs but don’t earn the wage premium associated with a college degree. They are much less likely to report “doing OK” financially than college graduates and or to be able to cover an unexpected $400 expense. They also report “significantly lower financial well-being than students who never attended college at all.”

We should worry less about elite schools, where high tuition is paired with ample financial aid, high graduation rates and strong employment outcomes, and more about colleges with woefully low completion rates. The long list includes for-profit schools, with average graduation rates of 20-30 percent , and schools that admit virtually all applicants and graduate on average just 28 percent of them. Some institutions have graduation rates as low as 2 percent . In contrast, schools that accept fewer than 25 percent of their applicants graduate 90 percent of their students.

The students most likely to leave without a degree often enter college with meagre financial resources. Schools that serve them need better academic advising; professional tutoring; clearer degree pathways; in-person or online courses available when students, many of whom work part- or full-time, need to take them; transfer policies that do not waste credits; and targeted financial aid. Moreover, government and accrediting agencies should hold institutions with persistently poor completion outcomes accountable.

Elite colleges, in our judgment, should do a far better job justifying six-figure charges, even if it means acknowledging an “open secret”: the sticker price paid by wealthy families helps subsidize the education of students from working-class families.

Even more important, however, is the urgent need for an in-depth, evidence-based public discussion about what colleges and government officials should do to ensure that students who start college have the resources they need to complete their degrees.

Getting this story right is an important first step. As some of the CNN panelists recognized, headlines suggesting that a four-year degree costs half a million dollars may frighten away precisely the students for whom college remains the surest path to economic mobility.

David Wippman is emeritus president of Hamilton College. Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.