Weekly Update

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After years of quietly falling, college tuition is on the rise again

Summer usually provides a respite for Connor Pavlicko from his duties as student body president at Slippery Rock University. But this summer, he was bombarded by classmates demanding to know why their tuition was suddenly going up.

What made these students particularly angry was that the 3.6 percent increase followed a span since 2018 in which tuition at public universities in Pennsylvania, including Slippery Rock, had been frozen in place, said Pavlicko, a junior political science and government major from Ohio.

“This is happening everywhere,” he said he found after “endlessly doomscrolling” social media.

Pavlicko’s right. Students nationwide are facing increases in tuition this fall of as high as 10 percent, along with new fees and rising costs for dorms and dining. And as in Pennsylvania, it’s an abrupt change from a period during which something happened that most Americans probably didn’t notice: Tuition had actually been falling, when adjusted for inflation, after decades of outpacing the cost of almost everything else.

Confused about college pricing? The Hechinger Report created Tuition Tracker to reveal the true cost of a degree. This tool lets anyone easily find data from colleges about what students are likely to pay based on their family’s income. The secret: That amount is usually a lot less than what colleges advertise. Tuition Tracker, which is used in schools and public libraries all over the country, also has information about graduation rates, the types of students at a given college and a lot more. Give it a try.

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