People walk by Duke Chapel on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, U.S.
Jim R. Bounds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The yearly cost of attendance at over a dozen colleges is now six figures, after factoring in 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 University of Chicago — have a sticker price of more than $100,000, according to data exclusively provided to CNBC from The Princeton Review’s upcoming “The Best 392 Colleges” list. Others, like 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, the author of “Dream School.”
“We just keep going up and it just never stops,” he said.
“We have been moving toward this six-figure price tag for a long time, and now we are here — and for a lot of people that feels significant,” Selingo said.
Some students and their families have reached their breaking point, he added, and as a result, smaller liberal arts colleges have started losing ground to larger — and less expensive — public schools. “There is a group of institutions that used to be able to command increasing their price without a problem, and now they are finding students and families pushing back,” Selingo said.
The high cost of college has turned some students off pricey private schools as more students question the return on investment, other data also shows.
“The cost of college is sobering — no doubt about that,” said Robert Franek, editor in chief at The Princeton Review, “and with some schools’ sticker prices crossing the $100,000 mark, paying for college seems all the more daunting.”
The Ivy League exception
These days, only the Ivy League and the nation’s other most selective colleges and universities can get away with unchecked price increases, Selingo said. “Harvard, Yale and Amherst will always find more than enough people who will pay whatever it takes to go there,” he said.
But many of these top schools are also addressing the college affordability crisis head-on by offering more generous financial aid packages, with some even covering the entire cost for low-income families.
Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the few that are “tuition-free” for undergraduates with family incomes of up to $200,000.
With rising college costs comes discounting
Even though the college tab seems increasingly out of reach, students and their parents rarely pay full price, many reports show.
“More and more of the schools are discounting tuition,” Selingo said.
Often in the form of merit 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 representing administrative and financial officers at more than 1,700 colleges and universities in the U.S.
“This means that for every dollar of undergraduate tuition and fees that these institutions could have charged, they awarded roughly 57 cents in grant aid to first-time undergraduates,” the report said.
In fact, “the higher a school’s sticker price, the more generous the school is likely to be with scholarship award offers to students they hope to enroll,” Franek said.
Of the 16 schools with six-figure price tags, the average scholarship grant awarded to first-year students with need in 2026-27 ranges 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 due to its sticker price, because odds are very good that you will receive a grant from that school,” NACUBO’s president and CEO Kara Freeman said in a statement.
A separate study by education lender Sallie found that families cover only about half of college costs with income and savings. Free money from scholarships and grants and student loans make up most of the rest, according to the annual How America Pays for College report.
