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...

Johns Hopkins University

Baltimore, MD (Maryland's largest city)

Annual tuition, fees, and room and board: $55,242

Students who apply to JHU also frequently apply to: Georgetown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University

Random rankings:

U.S. News : #13

Washington Monthly : #22

$55,242 perks: The Applied Physics Laboratory at JHU is funded to the tune of about a billion dollars a year and carries out cutting-edge, super-secret research. Wilson Fellowships offer a handful of lucky undergrads the opportunity to get mentored by illustrious professors and complete a really cool project.

Celebrity alumni: Michael Bloomberg (mayor of New York City), Murray Kempton (Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist), John Mauchly (co-designer of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer)

What you could buy with $55,242 instead: a one-night show by rapper Lupe Fiasco (or, at least, Boise State University paid $55,000 to Lupe Fiasco to perform at BSU's Spring Fling)

What do you think? Is Johns Hopkins tuition worth more than a night with Lupe Fiasco?

(Check out The 10 Most Expensive Colleges the Definitive List: Part 9