WASHINGTON — We all know things were cheaper in the old days (however you define them), but the increase in the cost of college is even more mind-blowing when you pull back for a historical look.
Money has compiled a list of 15 colleges and what they charged for tuition 100 years ago, in 1915. Some of the highlights:
- Tuition to Harvard in 1915 was $150 a year; now, it’s $45,278.
- MIT’s tuition has jumped from $250 to more than $46,000 over the past hundred years.
- NYU charged $125 a year in 1915, $47,750 now.
- Yale cost $160 a year; today, almost $47,000.
It’s easy to point to inflation — after all, a first-class stamp no longer costs two cents, and while gas has gotten cheaper over the past year, it’s never hitting 15 cents again. But even figuring that in, Harvard’s $150 annual tuition would only bump up to $3,544, Money says; MIT’s, a shade over $5,900; Yale’s, $3,780, and NYU’s, $2,953. The Consumer Price Index has risen 2,263 percent since 1915, while average tuition costs have gone up 42,930 percent.
You can’t even calculate the percentage increase of tuition for Stanford, the University of Georgia and the University of Illinois: In 1915, they were all free.
Money acknowledges that many people don’t pay full tuition price today, but, they argue, not everyone did then either.
