Fifty colleges have tuition higher than $60k

Take a guess: What’s the most expensive college in the country?

How much do you think that school charges for tuition, plus room and board?

The answer: Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.

Students at the private liberal arts college — which was founded in 1955 and focuses on math, engineering and the physical and biological sciences — pay $64,527 per year ($48,694 in tuition and fees, plus $15,833 for room and board).

Why am I telling you this? You know the cost of higher education is rising. You know that Americans’ collective student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion.

But did you know that this year, 50 colleges across the country are charging more than $60,000 for tuition, fees, and room-and-board? (A big thanks to Business Insider for compiling the list.)

Guess how many schools charged that much last year.

Only nine.

It should be noted that not all of those 41 schools jacked their prices way up; they were already approaching the $60,000-mark last year. All it took was another year of inflation and, depending on the school, slashed public funding, to tip the balance.

But when you compare the most expensive school last year to the most expensive school this year, there’s a pretty substantial jump. In 2013, New York University offered the nation’s priciest college education for $61,977.

That’s $2,550 cheaper than the most expensive tuition this year, at Harvey Mudd. Also alarming: Harvey Mudd’s tuition jumped $2,767 over the past year.

The only Maryland school to make the Top 50 list is Johns Hopkins University, which comes in at No. 12. Hopkins Blue Jays forked over $61,806 in tuition, fees and room-and-board this year, a 3.5 percent year-over-year increase. 

These totals do not include other necessary expenses for college students — namely, beer and textbooks. According to one widely-accepted estimate, the typical student pays $2,000 in additional expenses each year.