The cost of attending several Ivy League colleges has exceeded $90,000 for the coming academic year.
The University of Pennsylvania will charge undergraduate students living on campus $92,288 (£72,904) for tuition, housing and supplies, making it the most expensive of the eight elite universities in the northeastern United States.
Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth College and Yale all charge more than $90,000 for full fee-paying students, meaning the cost of a four-year degree there would now surpass $360,000.
The cost of studying at an Ivy League university rose between 3.6 per cent and 4.5 per cent compared with the 2023-24 academic year, and is now well over the median household income in the US of $74,580.
Students from lower-income families are often eligible to receive financial assistance from the universities and the federal government. For example, Harvard students whose families earn $85,000 or less pay nothing towards their tuition fees. At Princeton, that household income threshold rises to $100,000.
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“We are having a sort of affordability crisis in higher [education] and even the perceived affordability is a huge barrier,” Mark Huelsman, a fellow at the Student Borrower Protection Center, told Bloomberg. “In general, it creates this access barrier for students who are like, ‘I can never afford that’.”
The rising cost has done little to reduce demand, however. First-year applications to Yale, Dartmouth and Penn were up more than 9 per cent this year, although applications to Harvard have fallen by 5 per cent. Claudine Gay resigned as its president in January amid accusations the college was failing to stem the rise of antisemitism on campus.
