The total cost of attendance for undergraduates for the 2025–2026 academic year will be $95,490, an increase of approximately five percent compared to the 2024–2025 school year, according to Dartmouth’s undergraduate admissions website. Cost of attendance is calculated by the sum of the costs of tuition, fees, housing and food as well as “estimated indirect costs,” including course materials.
In an email statement to The Dartmouth, College spokesperson Jana Barnello attributed the increase to “inflation, increased services to students, new academic initiatives, compliance requirements and other expenses.”
Barnello noted in the statement that the cost of attendance for graduate students will also increase.
This comes after Dartmouth has substantially increased its scholarship coverage. After receiving a $150 million bequest in March 2024, the College announced it had removed all parent tuition contributions for undergraduate students with a family income less than $125,000. Barnello said this policy would remain.
“Dartmouth financial aid meets 100% of demonstrated need for all undergraduates with no required loans and no parent contributions for families with income and typical assets below $125,000,” Barnello wrote.
Ari Graham-Gurland ’27 said the College should continue to prioritize financial aid by keeping it “steady” for students — regardless of whether that increases tuition.
“Making sure that [tuition is] accessible for the students who have the strongest barriers financially to access the College and its resources seems like the most important thing the College should be focusing on right now,” Graham-Gurland said.
That said, the increase in tuition cost also drew some students’ ire.
“Five percent in one year is just ridiculous,” Alex Duffield ’27 said.
Duffield also expressed his desire for more transparency in where the College is spending the additional money.
“I don’t know what they’re doing with the money,” he said. “ … If you’re going to ask me to pay more, you have to show me what you’re doing with it.”
Among the Ivy League, Dartmouth will have the fifth-highest cost of attendance for the 2025-2026 school year. Cornell University, Columbia University, Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania will each cost a few hundred dollars more than Dartmouth per year. Harvard University will have the lowest cost of attendance at $86,926.
The cost of tuition for undergraduates has steadily increased over the past 10 years although the percent increase between each year has been inconsistent, according to Dartmouth’s Office of Institutional Research.
Since 2015, the median percent increase in tuition per year is reported as around 3.85%, according to the OIR reports.
OIR’s records show that the cost of tuition for graduate students has also increased over the past 10 years, although there were three years with no increases in tuition at both Geisel School of Medicine and the Tuck School of Business.
“I think that this could affect a lot of people quite severely,” Duffield said. “Salaries aren’t going up by five percent in adjustment with yearly inflation.”
Vidushi Sharma ’27 is a managing editor and news reporter. She is from Hanover, N.H. and is majoring in Government and minoring in International Studies and Sociology. On campus, Vidushi is a Dickey Center War and Peace Fellow, an educational access advisor for the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact and an associate editor for the Dartmouth Law Journal.
