From time to time, various media outlets create the hardy perennial that is a list of the 10 most expensive colleges in the United States. These lists are all a little different. Virtually everyone agrees that Sarah Lawrence College is the most expensive, for example, but an outfit called Gothamist gives Bates College the dubious honor. Numbers 2-10 are never quite the same. We scoured a bunch of lists to find the 10 schools that show up as most expensive most often. Forget order. We can say with confidence that all 10 of these undergrad schools are absurdly expensive. Today, we present...

Bates College

Lewiston, Maine (35 miles north of Portland and 140 miles north of Boston)

Annual tuition, fees, and room and board: $55,300

Students who apply to Bates also frequently apply to: Bowdoin College, Colby College, Trinity College

Random rankings: #21 (U.S. News, national liberal arts colleges), #54 (Forbes, America's Best Colleges)

$55,300 perks: Bates boasts a reasonably unique short term in the spring that allows students to take cool classes (several abroad) and pursue unique opportunities. Resources are world-class and classes are intimate. Undergraduate research is essentially a norm.

Celebrity alumni: Bryant Gumbel (sportscaster), Edmund Muskie (American politician)

What you could buy with $55,300 instead: one month and about four hours of Charlie Sheen's $55,000 per month child support payments to ex-wife Brooke Mueller Sheen

Image Source: Charlie Sheen