Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education
Revealing the true cost of college
The Hechinger Report’s Tuition Tracker is a tool you can use to learn the relationship between what colleges say their tuition is and the actual costs of attending a given college. You can compare colleges using your family’s income to see what students like you paid in the past and might expect to pay now. The tool uses historical data to estimate what you might pay to attend in the 2025-26 academic year.
You can also compare colleges based on graduation rates — how likely a student is to complete their degree on time, which is a big factor in how much college will cost in the long run. There is also data about what the student body looks like and how many people stick with their school.
(Please note: Tuition Tracker uses cookies. Neither Tuition Tracker nor The Hechinger Report keep records of your personal data or answers to questions about income.)
Tuition Tracker is powered by U.S. Department of Education data from IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, a service provided by the National Center for Education Statistics. The institutions analyzed are all U.S.-based, degree-granting colleges and universities that have first-time, full-time undergraduates.
Net prices are for first-time, full-time students (and, for public institutions, in-state students). The projected prices for each institution were calculated by taking the compound annual growth rate over the period of 2013-14 to 2023-24 using raw IPEDS data, then projecting that rate from the 2023-24 sticker price up to the 2025-26 academic year. Institutions without consecutive years of data going back to 2012-13 will not have projected prices. Average net price projections are determined by applying the discount rate for each income level in the last historical year these data were available. The percentage of students paying sticker price is derived from IPEDS data on first-time, first-year students.
Graduation rates and retention rates are calculated from the last five years of available data.
The data on institutional characteristics, acceptance rates and enrollment by race/ethnicity and gender are published as they are provided in IPEDS. The tool was last updated in April 2025.
