Net Tuition Price Continues to Trend Downward

New research from Phil Levine, an economist and college cost transparency advocate, shows that the net price of four-year tuition continues to drop or remain steady for all but the highest-income students.

Levine’s research used net-price calculators as well as proprietary data from his own cost-estimator tool, MyinTuition. He found that, in general, students across all income brackets are paying less for college, adjusted for inflation, than they did six years ago at all types of institutions. In some cases, those drops were especially high, including for low- and middle-income students at the nation’s wealthiest private colleges; their average net price dropped 28.1 percent and 30.8 percent, respectively. Net cost for the highest-income students has also declined across institution types, although much more modestly.

Sticker prices themselves have decreased since 2019–20 after adjusting for inflation.

The study found that despite their higher sticker prices, private institutions with large endowments offer the most affordable net prices for low-income students, typically averaging around $5,000 annually. Levine noted, however, that these institutions tend to enroll small numbers of low-income students.

“While there may still be room to improve affordability, if anything the evidence suggests that college has, for the most part, become more affordable in the last decade,” Levine wrote in the report’s conclusion. “These findings should not be read as minimizing the financial strain many families experience but rather as evidence that those strains are not being driven by rising college net prices.”