I had someone over for dinner recently whose kids are right at that age where they start to roll out into the world, with their first step being four years of college. Their kids are close in age, so having three, as they do, means that at one point they will be paying for 2 kids in college. I was curious what a top private liberal arts school costs a year now. I know how much private school has gone up in NYC through friends, but I didn’t know how much college has gone up. The price is $106,000 a year, and it includes housing.
Let that number sit for a second. A hundred and six thousand dollars. Per year.
If your parents can’t cover that, and most parents can’t, you’re looking at loans or praying for scholarships. That price is for one thing only: wealthy people whose children can experience college without entering the working world in debt. A graduate carrying this debt, because of interest, could be paying it off well into their late fifties. That is a very long time to have that sit on your head. Does anyone really want to walk out of college in their early twenties already half a million dollars in debt, only to realize the life they actually want to build doesn’t require — or even benefit from — the degree that put them there?
That math doesn’t work. I’m a huge believer in the liberal arts. There is real value in having four years of your life, at exactly that age, to find yourself — to take an opera class, or a film class, to read and argue about literature, to pick up a guitar for the first time, to sit with ideas you never would have encountered otherwise. That kind of education shapes people in ways that show up decades later, long after anyone remembers the syllabus. I see it in our kids and their friends. Their knowledge of culture makes them see the world through a different lens, and that is a gift.
But is that experience worth $106,000 a year? I don’t think so. Not even close. What happens to schools that can’t justify the price, or where the entire student body consists only of wealthy kids and kids with full rides? What happens to the middle that balances out the conversations?
What happens to all the universities charging elite prices for an education that isn’t elite? Where people don’t believe the education is worth it unless they can get a degree from a top university. We are seeing that play out in law school and other graduate schools. Why bother going if the degree isn’t going to get you the job you want in order to pay back that debt? Will families keep paying? Or are we headed toward a system where only the wealthy can afford the full college experience, and everyone else gets priced out entirely?
I think AI is going to be one of the most interesting forces in this story — not as a talking point, but as something every parent will end up paying close attention to, whether they mean to or not. Will schools build AI-forward curricula that let them deliver a real education at a fraction of today’s cost? Will some version of the four-year liberal arts experience survive at a price people can actually afford? Or will the institutions that can’t adapt simply stop existing? What will happen to people entering education as professors and alike?
Education has always been personal. Most parents want for their kids what they themselves had, or better, whether that’s public school, private school, or a particular college. That instinct isn’t going away. But the price tag attached to it might make those choices either impossibly costly or, in some cases, no longer available at all.
Interesting times ahead.
