San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
California school costs rank with East Coast
Several New England colleges have made headlines recently for soaring price tags, with a year’s tuition and costs topping $90,000 for the coming school year. Data shows that some California colleges are not far off, costing just as much or more for students who are required to pay top dollar.
While Tufts University in Boston comes out above most California universities — with a year’s tuition, housing and other expenses topping $96,000, according to a CNN report — Pepperdine and the University of Southern California, both in Los Angeles County, are not far behind, each with total costs around $95,200, according to the universities’ websites.
Harvey Mudd, one of the Claremont Colleges also in Los Angeles County, has an eye-popping sticker price, too — $93,100 — for 2024-25. Other Southern California private schools like Claremont McKenna, California Institute of Technology and Chapman University also had total costs topping $90,000. Pomona College and the University of San Diego were slightly lower, at $89,400 and $80,600, respectively.
In the Bay Area, Stanford University’s estimated cost of attendance rivaled those in Southern California at $92,900 per year. Other private schools like Santa Clara University and the University of San Francisco have not yet crossed the $90,000 mark, at $85,700 and $80,300, respectively.
Colleges and universities are required to publish a “cost of attendance” estimation, a figure that includes tuition, housing and other campus fees as well as other estimated costs, like books, transportation and personal expenses, based on student surveys and adjusted for inflation. Some colleges also include the cost of university-provided health insurance, which students can opt out of if they are already insured, in their calculation.
The cost of attendance also assumes the student is paying full tuition, something only a fraction of students do, when taking into account financial aid and scholarships from both the colleges themselves and from the state and federal governments. For the 2020-21 school year, 88% of students attending a fouryear, private, nonprofit college — the types of schools that typically have the highest sticker prices — received aid from one of these sources, according to the College Board.
While they may not translate to what the average student might pay, the sticker prices still offer a glimpse into the skyrocketing cost of higher education, a trend that’s been affecting students for more than a decade.
California private school sticker prices are in line with many of those on the East Coast like Amherst College, New York University, Brown, Dartmouth, Yale and Boston University, all of which cost more than $90,000 annually, according to their websites.
For in-state students, California’s public universities offer lower prices for those paying full tuition. UC Berkeley is estimated to cost students nearly $48,600 annually, while UC San Diego comes in at $43,800 and UCLA at $42,100.
But because the advertised costs often do not match up with what students will actually pay, many colleges offer a net price calculator on their websites to help applicants determine what the college might cost for them, based on factors like family income. Some also point students toward MyinTuition, an online tool developed by Wellesley College economics professor Phillip Levine that produces quick cost estimates, though it cannot provide calculations for every college.