Why Is Our College So Expensive?
Chace Benoist: Rising tuition reflects the growing cost of the modern college bureaucracy.
The cost of attending college keeps climbing, and private institutions are leading the way. At Davidson College, tuition will reach $73,090 in 2026-2027, a 6.5 percent increase from the prior year and up $9,240 from 2024-2025. Total billed costs, including tuition, housing, food, and fees, will hit $93,140. Davidson is not an outlier. In 2023-2024, Amherst College and Davidson each raised their total cost of attendance by 4.94 percent. Bates College raised its costs by 3.95 percent that same year. Rising costs at selective private colleges are not just a Davidson problem. They are an industry-wide pattern.
At most private institutions, payroll is the largest expense. Davidson employs 236 instructional faculty and 985 total employees as of 2024, with staff outnumbering teaching faculty by more than three to one. And this reflects a national trend. Research consistently shows that administrative and professional staff have grown faster than faculty relative to student enrollment over the past several decades.
Even donor-funded projects can bring a financial burden. Davidson recently announced a $100 million library renovation, the largest capital project in the college’s history. The project is largely donor-funded, with $60 million from the Duke Endowment and $25 million from alumnus Bob Abernethy. But pursuing gifts at that scale is not free. According to its IRS Form 990, Davidson spent more than $10.8 million on fundraising operations in fiscal year 2023 alone. The more ambitious the fundraising goal, the larger the operation needed to reach it.
Many private colleges, though, advertise tuition rates that few students actually pay. At Davidson, 69 percent of first-time students received financial aid in 2022-2023. Institutional grants and scholarships offset a significant share of billed charges, but managing that system requires its own administrative apparatus for financial aid, compliance, and enrollment strategy. Colleges with large endowments maintain substantial fundraising operations for the same reason. In practice, this becomes a feedback loop: higher costs require more fundraising, more fundraising requires more staff, and more staff adds to the operating expenses.
These are real expenses, not invented ones. But when tuition rises 6.5 percent in a single year and staff outnumber teaching faculty by more than three to one, it is fair to ask what families are actually paying for. The answer is no longer just classrooms and professors. It is also the cost of maintaining a modern institution, with all the offices, personnel, and infrastructure that now come with it. Whether that balance still reflects Davidson’s core educational mission is a question worth asking.