Springtime in the US for some families is spent waiting by the mailbox for a coveted acceptance letter to one of the country’s prestigious Ivy League schools.
It used to be that being accepted was the hard part, but now paying for it just became even more out of reach.
As average Americans struggle to pay for eggs, overachievers and their parents will now have to dig a little deeper for that piece of parchment.
Four years at an Ivy League college now costs an average of $300,000, with the annual price of tuition, and room and board more than $80,000 at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Columbia and Brown, according to Bloomberg.
Cornell and Brown are even more expensive, with an average of $85,000 a year.
“Cheaper” options of Princeton and Harvard are about $76,000 a year.
Some economists warn that these hallowed halls are putting student numbers at risk if they continue to raise tuition at such rates.
And 44 per cent to 67 per cent of Ivy Leaguers receive financial aid, meaning growing costs can be prohibitive.
“At some point, that math stops working out,” Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on the economics of higher education, told Bloomberg.
“We get to a place where these degrees are just no longer worth it.”
Inflation is not helping to keep costs at bay, no matter the income bracket.
Commonfund, an asset management company, determined that the cost of university rose by more than 5 per cent in 2022, the most that operational costs have increased in a single year since 2001, Bloomberg reported.
