Public University Tuition over time

The cost of college has been a hot topic for a while now, and even though some studies suggest the net cost of college has been falling post-COVID, it's clear that sticker prices have not been.

And because the overwhelming majority of college and university students in the US attend public institutions, that's a good place to start the discussion.

This is data from IPEDS, showing published cost about 530 public, four-year institutions that award the bachelor's degree, excluding community colleges that have been creeping into that category over time. Each dot represents an institution, and the data are from 2009, 2016, and 2023 to show long-term trends. The dots are colored by geographic region.

The data are displayed four ways, from left to right and default to published Tuition and Fees: Resident, Nonresident, the premium nonresidents pay (in dollars), and the premium not residents pay (as a percentage of what residents pay.) You can change this to show just tuition or just fees by using the control at the top right.

You can also filter to a single state, if you wish, to get a sense of how that state things about tuition.

The green-shaded Highlight boxes at right will allow you to make either one institution, one region, or one state standout, without filtering the other data.

The data are displayed in a box-and-whisker format: The shaded boxes cover the middle 50% of the range, with the dividing line the 50th percentile. The rest of the data are mostly contained within the boundary created by the top bar and bottom bar, with outliers being shown above or below it. These are not enrollment weighted.

As always, I happy to hear what you got out of this. Leave a comment below or send me an email.

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