Every college posts a price, and almost no one pays it. The real number sits inside a black box built from your income, your home state and the school's own rules. For a New York family earning $180,000, our estimates run from $21,600 a year at Yale to $76,274 at Michigan. Open the box one clue at a time.
Sixteen campuses with a JLIC rabbinic couple from the Orthodox Union, plus Yeshiva University. Barnard, Queens College and Brooklyn College are left out because we could not find reliable prices.
Every case starts with the number on the school's website. Each bar below is one school's posted price for a year: tuition, fees, housing and food, the four things a school bills for. For public universities it is the price for a family from .
Most private universities sit above $90,000. Hold that number loosely. Very few families pay it.
Open the price and it splits into parts. Each bar below shows a school's tuition, fees, housing and food, as the school publishes them. The red piece at public universities is the extra charged to students from another state.
Tuition is the biggest part almost everywhere. Keep an eye on it, because in the next clue it starts to disappear.
This is where most of the mystery lives. Most private universities here now publish an aid promise: below one income, tuition is free, and below a lower one, everything is. The pale bar in the first chart shows the incomes where tuition is free, the dark bar the incomes where everything is free, and the dashed line is your income, .
Now apply those promises to your family. In the next chart, the pale bar is the posted price and the blue bar is the estimated bill after aid. The shorter the blue bar, the more the posted price was hiding.
Earning more than a limit does not mean getting nothing. Schools still review each family, and many families above the limits receive grants, especially with a second child in college. Yeshiva University publishes no income limits, but says it will consider tuition a family pays for younger children at private elementary and high schools, which describes most day school families.
At public universities, it changes it a lot. Each bar below splits a public university's price into housing and food (gray), in-state tuition (dark) and the extra charge for students from another state (red). Hatching marks tuition a state program pays for you.
New York's Excelsior Scholarship pays SUNY and CUNY tuition for New York families earning up to $125,000, if the student then lives and works in New York for as many years as the scholarship paid. Rutgers offers free tuition to New Jersey families earning under $65,000.
This looked like a prime suspect. It turns out to be a red herring. A bar to the right means the kosher meal plan costs more per year than the regular plan, a bar to the left means less, and a dot on the center line means the same price.
What differs is how much kosher food there is. UCLA has no kosher dining hall, only frozen meals and a Hillel lunch four days a week. Maryland's kosher plan works only at Hillel. Cornell may charge extra for some Shabbat meals, Rutgers' Chabad House serves Shabbat meals free, and at Yeshiva University every meal is kosher.
The last clue is the calendar. A bill is paid every year the student is on campus, so each bar below shows the whole degree, split by where the money would come from: teal for your 529 and savings, blue for student loans, orange for family help, and dark gray for your income.
Sometimes, and every year saved is a full year's bill a family never pays. Three kinds of credit can shorten a degree: a year of study in Israel, AP or IB exams, and college courses taken in high school. Each school decides how much of each it accepts, and the rules differ a great deal.
Yeshiva University gives credit for its Israel program, recorded as block credit without grades, and those credits do not count toward the time a student must spend in residence at YU. Brooklyn College grants up to 27 credits for full-time study at a listed Israeli yeshiva or seminary, once the student earns a B or higher in an approved Judaic Studies course on campus. For most of the other schools here, including Binghamton, we did not find a published policy on yeshiva or seminary credit. Israel programs run through an accredited university, such as Bar-Ilan, usually transfer like any other college course.
The years-on-campus slider above lets you see the difference. Set it to three and every total on this page drops by a quarter. Before counting on it, ask each school in writing how many credits it will accept and whether they let a student graduate early, because the private universities with the largest aid promises often expect students to stay for four years.
The posted price was the decoy. Plan around your bill after aid, which depends mostly on your income and your home state. The kosher kitchen barely moves it.
A school's own net price calculator may come in lower. Where a school has no aid rule at your income, the table shows the government's average for families like yours, for reference only.
(heshbon, a reckoning) What these estimates leave out.
The data tables, calculator worksheet and source log are available as a methodology companion, offered as a separate download.
Ḥeshbon
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for, published in full. Every figure comes from the underlying research, and where a chart simplifies a published result the piece says so.
Each piece here is published, with its own sources, sample sizes and limits stated in place. Percentages describe the samples observed, and several rest on small denominators, noted where they appear. Nothing here audits an individual institution. Aliyah figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that.