College Costs Surge 10% Higher Than Last Year, New Report Shows

By Ireland Owens

U.S. higher education costs have surged over the past year, according to a Sallie Mae/Ipsos report out Wednesday.

The new report found that total college costs for families climbed to an estimated $34,019 during the 2025-26 academic year, marking a 10% rise from the year prior, Higher Ed Dive reported. Meanwhile, U.S. families had to pay out of pocket for 49% of those education costs. (RELATED: Houston Might Be The Biggest Story In Education No One Is Talking About)

A Sallie Mae spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the new report “finds that college spending rose but that’s not necessarily a function of higher tuition alone.” The spokesperson added that the $34,019 total spent during the 2025-26 academic year “includes every dollar used towards higher education last year which is everything from tuition and fees to books, technology, meals, housing, travel, and other related expenses.”

The poll also shows that price was a key factor for students selecting a college, Higher Ed Dive reported. Of families surveyed, 79% counted out colleges “at multiple stages” while making decisions due to their total price.

“Families reported spending more for higher education and eight in 10 also say they are confident in how they paid for it, even if that meant stretching financially to get there,” Sallie Mae spokesperson Rick Castellano told the DCNF in a statement. “That said, a little more than half of families (52%), reported paying less than the full advertised sticker price for school. At the same time, misconceptions about scholarships and the FAFSA could mean families are missing out on opportunities to make college more affordable.”

The report’s release comes after other recent polling has suggested that many Americans think U.S. colleges are not doing a sufficient enough job of preparing students to enter the workforce and believe higher education has become unaffordable.

Additionally, some major drivers of surging college costs across the nation include administrative expansion, increased staffing levels, a rise in non-instructional spending, campus facilities being expanded and overall heightened demand for higher education, according to the American College of Education.

Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott asserted in a June 12, 2025 X post that the U.S. higher education system “is broken.”

“Americans are paying rising costs for college, while the value of their degrees continues to plummet,” Scott continued.

Sallie Mae, officially known as the SLM Corporation, is a publicly traded bank that is the largest lender of private student loans in the U.S.

Ipsos surveyed 1,000 undergraduate students aged 18-24 and 1,000 parents of traditional-age undergraduate students via an online survey conducted between late April and late May.

Some colleges have raised spending on administrators by more than 600% in recent years. Over a 25-year period,  “American colleges added over 500,000 administrators,” notes the Harvard Crimson.

In 2011, the University of California at San Diego added a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position augmented “UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus,” which included “the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.”

Harvard University has so many unnecessary officials it created a useless “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage…composed of 24 members” that “produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total,” all about a subject few people care about. In response to this useless report, Harvard “announced the creation of a new administrative post, the ‘FAS campus curator,’ and” a permanent “new committee, the ‘FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.’” 

This task force was spawned by yet another unnecessary task force — it was “created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging.”

Going to college no longer expands people’s minds and vocabularies the way it once did: Since 1970, there has been a steady decline in the correlation between years of education and people’s personal word stock.