Day school tuition rises about 4% a year. Does it track inflation?

How far did inflation move over these nine years, and how far did tuition move?

Between 2018 and 2025, annual inflation ranged from well under one percent to over nine. Median nominal tuition growth stayed between three and four and a half percent the whole time, varying about one-sixth as much as the figure it supposedly tracked.

The two cells below carry the same measurement applied to a different series: the distance in percentage points from that series' lowest year to its highest. A bigger number means a series that swung further. The pale cell is consumer prices. The dark cell is posted tuition.

Notice how much of the pale cell's number the dark cell fails to reach.

One of these lines is doing something.

Year by year, do the two lines ever move together?

Two lines run across the chart below, one point for each school year from 2018–19 to 2024–25. The grey line is consumer price inflation, measured June to June. The dark line is the median annual increase in posted tuition, computed inside each school, so a school is only ever compared against itself.

Both lines sit on the same vertical scale, in percent, and the dashed line across the middle is zero. Higher on the page means a bigger increase. The four buttons above the chart change which line is drawn heavy; the last one adds a third line, in rust, which is the tuition increase with inflation subtracted out. The shaded rust band covers 2021–22 and 2022–23.

Watch the grey line climb and fall back while the dark line underneath it barely bends.

Anything genuinely indexed to consumer prices would have registered a swing that size. Median tuition growth held between 3.05% and 4.51% throughout, so schools applied something close to a customary annual increase rather than reading the CPI. The real price then follows by arithmetic: an ordinary nominal bump produced a +3.16% real gain in the calm year and a −5.09% real cut in the spike year. Every school in the balanced panel fell below inflation in 2021–22, the only year that happened.

The same sector, very different prices.

Four percent of what, though?

Each square in the grid below is one state or province, set in roughly its place on the map. The shading carries the number: a square is filled with rust in proportion to the median posted tuition there, so the palest squares sit near $9k and the fully saturated ones near $34k. The small figure under each abbreviation is that median rounded to the nearest thousand. Squares left empty are states with fewer than two reporting schools.

Find the darkest square, then the palest one carrying a figure. Hover or tap any tile for the exact number.

Gain, collapse, partial recovery.

Once the surge passed, did schools claw the real price back?

The chart below cuts the window into three stretches and gives each one a bar. The vertical line down the middle is zero, the point at which tuition rose at exactly the rate of inflation. A bar running right of that line is a stretch when the posted price gained on inflation. A bar running left is a stretch when it lost. The rust bar is the surge itself, the two slate bars the years on either side of it. Length is the median annual real change, computed inside each school.

Notice that the rust bar points the other way from the other two, and reaches further.

It matches on the total and nowhere else.

So: day school tuition rises about 4% a year. Does it track inflation?

Only in the total, and only by accident. Across seven years the median school ended 1.0% higher in real terms, essentially unchanged. That net reflects missing inflation in both directions and landing near even, and 41% of schools still finished lower in real terms than where they started.

A school that indexed its price to the CPI would have raised tuition by nine percent in one year and by well under one percent in another. None of them did. They raised it by roughly four, every year, and let the arithmetic fall where it fell.