Summer usually provides a respite for Connor Pavlicko from his duties as student body president at Slippery Rock University. But this summer, he was bombarded by classmates demanding to know why their tuition was suddenly going up.

What made these students particularly angry was that the 3.6 percent increase followed a span since 2018 in which tuition at public universities in Pennsylvania, including Slippery Rock, had been frozen in place, said Pavlicko, a junior political science and government major from Ohio.

“This is happening everywhere,” he said he found after “endlessly doomscrolling” social media.

Pavlicko’s right. Students nationwide are facing increases in tuition this fall of as high as 10 percent, along with new fees and rising costs for dorms and dining. And as in Pennsylvania, it’s an abrupt change from a period during which something happened that most Americans probably didn’t notice: Tuition had actually been falling, when adjusted for inflation, after decades of outpacing the cost of almost everything else.

That’s among the conclusions of The Hechinger Report’s update of its Tuition Tracker tool, which shows what students pay to go to individual colleges and universities based on their families’ incomes.

The average net amount that students paid for college, after discounts and financial aid, went up only about a third as much as what Americans shelled out for all the other things they bought, once inflation is accounted for, the Tuition Tracker shows. The finding covers the five years ending in 2023, the most recent period for which federal figures are available.

In real dollars, and as economists track it, this means the price went down — among other reasons, because colleges were trying to boost sagging enrollments.

The bad news, for students and institutions alike, is that now the price is starting to go up again, as higher education contends with financial and political challenges.

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“We had this period where it looked like things were improving,” said Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

“I’m concerned, and I think a lot of policymakers are concerned, that we’re at a turning point where we’re going to descend back to a time when it’s more difficult” for students and their families to pay for college, Scott-Clayton said.

Even before this new round of price increases, fewer than half of Americans thought the returns on a four-year college education were worth the cost, a survey last year by the Pew Research Center found.

Now, at the same time many universities and colleges are raising their tuition, they’re cutting programs and laying off staff to close budget deficits. This means many students will be paying more and getting less.

The longer-term steady increase in the cost of higher education is already a major reason the proportion of high school students going on to get degrees has been steadily falling, said Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who studies college financing.

A growing number of undergraduates — more than 4 in 10, according to a survey by the student loan provider Sallie Mae — considered alternatives to college such as trade schools or apprenticeships. Among those who do pursue degrees, affordability is tied with geography as the top deciding factors in which colleges they choose.

Considering the growing skepticism that college is “the magic ticket to the American dream,” said Gillen, raising tuition, for many higher education institutions, “definitely has the potential to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

But universities and colleges are confronting unprecedented problems on the funding side.

For one thing, the struggle to contain their prices has made it hard for them to cover their own costs. Institutions’ revenue from tuition fell in five of the last six years, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO — last year alone, by more than at any time in the 4 1/2 decades that the figure has been tracked.

State appropriations, which are the other main source of income for public universities and colleges, have gone up for five straight years, nationwide. But the rate of increase has begun to slow, SHEEO reports.

This year, a growing number of states are facing budget deficits. And the $100 billion a year in Medicaid cuts approved by Republicans in Congress means that, beginning next year, states will have to take on some of those costs. Historically, public universities have been among the first to see their appropriations reduced in response to competing demands for state funding.

There’s other tough financial news. More than 600 universities and colleges have had federal grants cut off or frozen, according to the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Those budget hits equate to between $3 per student in West Virginia and $1,752 per student in South Dakota, the center calculates.

Most, though not all, of those reductions have affected research and not teaching. But “these institutions are very complex and they’re interconnected, so cuts that are happening in one area don’t just affect that one area. They affect the whole financial picture of the institution,” Scott-Clayton said.

The effects of the federal funding hits have not been limited to elite private, nonprofit colleges, even though those have gotten much of the attention. More than twice as much was cut from federal grants to public universities, or $2.1 billion, as from private institutions, which have lost or stand to lose about $1.2 billion.

Two other important sources of revenue have also been imperiled by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.

A crackdown on international students is projected to reduce international enrollment by as much as 40 percent, according to NAFSA, the association representing administrators who oversee international education. And a cap passed by Congress on federal loans for graduate students could reduce enrollment in those programs or force institutions to reduce the prices for them — a good development for students, but another potential financial blow for colleges.

Some wealthy institutions will now have to pay taxes on their endowments, too, stripping them of a collective $1.7 billion next year, under yet another congressional decree.

Expenses are also up, thanks to inflation and the resulting demands for higher salaries from universities’ and colleges’ large labor forces.

At the moment, colleges and universities are enjoying their largest number of customers in years, to whom they can pass along these costs. Enrollment has largely rebounded from pandemic lows, and the number of high school graduates in the spring reached a peak of nearly 4 million. Souped-up demand like that typically allows a seller to charge higher prices.

“It’s kind of a return to normal. The pandemic was so disruptive. What we’ve seen is that there’s been a slight uptick in demand for higher education,” said Dustin Weeden, associate vice president at SHEEO.

In the case of universities, however, that demand will be short-lived. The number of high school graduates is projected to decline beginning next year, noted Jeff Denning, associate professor of public affairs and education at the University of Texas at Austin.

“In terms of supply and demand, there’s more demand right now than there’s going to be for a long time,” Denning said.

All of these things are contributing to this fall’s tuition hikes — though some institutions are straining to avoid calling them that — and budget cuts.

In what it describes as “an inflationary tuition increase,” for example, the University of Nebraska system is raising tuition by 5 percent while also trimming nearly $28 million from the budget of the flagship Lincoln campus alone. Michigan State University is raising tuition by 4.5 percent — it calls this a “tuition adjustment” — while reducing spending by 9 percent over two years.

Facing a $164 million budget deficit, the California State University system — the largest four-year university system in the country — is raising tuition by 6 percent for the second year in a row. It has also cut 1,200 employees and 1,430 course sections on seven of its 23 campuses, a spokeswoman, Amy Bentley-Smith, confirmed, including in courses students are required to take to graduate. That’s about 7 percent of all course sections on those campuses.

Revealing the true cost of college

These kinds of price increases coinciding with cuts in classes and services “certainly could explain some of the public opinion surveys that show people’s frustration with the sector,” Scott-Clayton said.

“Nobody wants to see tuition going up,” she said, “but you also want to know that when you get there, there will still be quality instructors to teach the courses, and there will be places to get help.”

Tuition at the University of Maryland will rise by 4 percent, and mandatory fees by 4.5 percent, after the state — facing its own budget deficit — cut the university’s appropriation. Despite the higher price, the university system’s chancellor told legislators that student advising, career counseling and mental health workers were being cut and the provost said that faculty positions will be left unfilled, making it harder for students to get into classes they need to graduate on time.

In New Hampshire, tuition is going up at the public universities by 2.5 percent while spending is being cut by 18 percent and employees are laid off. Chancellor Catherine Provencher conceded to legislators that steeper cost and fewer services mean “our enrollment is going to fall off.” The Community College System of New Hampshire will also increase tuition by 7 percent after 12 years of leaving it almost flat.

The University of Minnesota system is raising tuition by 4 percent, to 6.5 percent, depending on the campus, and 7.5 percent for out-of-state students — the most in more than a decade — while also cutting its budget by 7 percent. The system’s governing board said that even though the state was giving it the same amount it got last year, inflation had reduced its buying power.

After having benefited over the last few years from lower tuition at public universities competing for their business, out-of-state students are bearing the brunt of increases in several states.

The University of Florida and Florida State University are raising tuition for out-of-state students by 10 percent. Tuition will rise for out-of-state students at Clemson University and the University of South Carolina by 3 percent; all students there will also see increases in housing and meal plan prices and a new $300-a-year athletics fee. The University of Michigan is increasing tuition and fees by 3.4 percent for in-state and 4.9 percent for out-of-state students, while dorm and dining rates rise by 6 percent. And in-state students at the University of Pittsburgh will pay 2 percent more this fall, out-of-state students 4 percent more.

In Kansas, five of the six public universities will raise tuition by 2.5 percent to 4 percent, depending on the campus. Tuition will be up by 3 percent this fall at the University of Oklahoma, and by as much as 8 percent at other public universities and colleges in Oklahoma, which cite rising health insurance premiums and the need for long-delayed maintenance.

After five years of almost no increases, the South Dakota Board of Regents is raising tuition at that state’s public universities by 2.9 percent. The Universities of Wisconsin system plans a 4 percent to 5 percent tuition hike, depending on the campus, though Republican state legislators there are trying to limit the increase to no more than the inflation rate; it’s the third straight tuition increase after a 10-year tuition freeze, and comes despite promises of an additional $256 million in state funding over the next two years. And the University of Tennessee system is raising tuition by up to 3 percent, depending on the campus.

Many private universities and colleges are making similar moves. The cost of attendance at Duke University this fall is up by nearly 6 percent*, to more than $92,000 a year, for instance. That decision came even before the university found itself a target of Trump administration funding cuts and investigations, announced that 600 employees had accepted buyouts and offered retirement incentives to 250 faculty. Still more layoffs were planned.

At Slippery Rock and other Pennsylvania public universities, that 3.6 percent tuition increase equates to about $300 a year, for in-state students for a new total of $11,000 a year in tuition and fees, and from $418 to $556 a year for students from out of state, to $15,000 a year. That does not include room and board.

A difference like this might not sound huge, said Pavlicko, the student body president, but “things may have already been tight for some students.”

He’s encouraging people to learn why their tuition is increasing.

“Despite the consistent student belief that the university president has a big red button and a price adjustor like at a gas station, that is not true.”

He’s also steering fellow students to the financial aid office and to money-saving services such as a food pantry and free bus transportation to off-campus apartments.

“Let’s not let people suffer alone,” Pavlicko said.

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

*CORRECTION: An earlier version misstated what has increased at Duke University. The cost of attendance grew by nearly 6 percent this fall.

This story about college tuition was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional data analysis by Sarah Butrymowicz. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.