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. Today, we present...
New York, NY (in Manhattan's Upper West Side neighborhood)
Annual tuition, fees, and room and board: $56,310
Students who apply to Columbia also frequently apply to: New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University
Random rankings: #13 (Forbes, America's Best Colleges), #4 (U.S. News, national universities)
$56,310 perks: Columbia has all the resources you'd expect from an Ivy League school. On top of that, it's located in Manhattan. The core curriculum here is rightfully renowned far and wide as among the best in the country. Science and engineering are big, too, and research opportunities are abundant for undergrads.
Celebrity alumni: Barack Obama (44th President of the United States), Julia Stiles (actress), Vikram Pandit (CEO, Citigroup)
What you could buy with $56,310 instead: a perfectly nice four-bedroom house in Norcross, Georgia ($56,000)