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Cost of attendance rises to $96,078 for 2025-26 year

For international students, the cost of attendance for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has reached $100,000.

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West Hall, the future home of the SWANA community space, is pictured on the Academic Quad.

The new full cost of attendance for Tufts University will be approximately $96,078 for incoming undergraduate students for the 2025–26 academic year. The estimated total cost of attendance has gone up by $3,911. The cost of attendance for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has surpassed $100,000 for international students, reaching a total of $100,682.

The university remains committed to meeting students’ demonstrated financial need, meaning many undergraduate students will not actually pay the full sticker price. According to Patrick Collins, executive director of media relations, despite annual rises in cost of attendance, the average cost for students has decreased in recent years because of increases in financial aid coverage.

“The university will cover the difference between what we estimate a family can afford, based on their income and assets, and the total cost of attendance. Forty-four percent of undergraduate students receive financial aid, with an average annual award of $55,000,” he stated Tufts increases the undergraduate financial aid budget by at least as much as the increase in tuition and fees each year, and often much more.”

According to Collins, the rises in the cost of healthcare, infrastructure for facilities, information technology and cybersecurity have contributed to this year’s rise in cost of attendance as well as the costs of renovations and upgrades to over 150 classrooms.

“We realize that this is a significant investment for students and their families,” Collins wrote. “We have worked hard to keep increases as low as possible while advancing the University’s mission for excellence in teaching, learning, and research.”

The university’s recent construction projects, such as the renovations of Eaton and Bacon Halls and the construction of a dorm on Boston Ave., are also spurring an increase in tuition.

“The cost of attendance will not go down when capital projects are finished,” Collins said. “For the Student Residence Facility, the operating and maintenance costs of the building, including debt service over the life of the bonds financing the project, will be covered by the developer, Capstone, and supported by student rents.”

Tufts Community Union Treasurer Dhruv Sampat, a junior who manages the school’s undergraduate student activities fund, expressed concern for the inability of students to participate in extracurricular activities as a result of paying more for tuition.

Tufts is very big on extracurriculars. There are also things that you have to pay for to participate — in events, in programming and in clubs on campus,” he said. “So that is where I come in. In the last two years, it has been my mission as Treasurer to try and reduce those costs as much as possible.”

Although Sampat said he has worked to reduce the external costs of campus life, he believes that recent tuition raises will have a “negative impact” on the socioeconomic makeup of the undergraduate population.

It is quite intuitive that there would only be a certain demographic of people that could be able to pay such increased costs,” Sampat said. “That always raises the risk of having a campus that has people from very, very similar economic backgrounds.”

President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars from other colleges, such as the University of Pennsylvania, and has gone so far as to cancel $400 million in funding to Columbia University.

Sponsored research, grants and contracts provided nearly a fifth of the university’s revenue last year. The federal government provided about $185 million of that amount toward Tufts, funds that are now at risk under the Trump administration. However, according to Collins, this year’s tuition rise is not intended to cover for that possibility.

“This year’s increase will be consistent with prior years and is not intended to offset any potential losses in federal funding,” he stated.

Sampat said that as tuition costs continue to rise, students on financial aid have increasingly used the TCU Senate’s Student Support Fund to help cover club expenses that would usually have to be paid out-of-pocket.

We try and cover costs for students who would otherwise have to worry about finding places to pay for these things,” he said. “And the use of [the Support Fund] has definitely increased, obviously because of rising costs, and also because of just how costs in general at this university are increasing.”

Sampat believes the university administration should be transparent about where tuition money goes.

We’re expanding a whole lot, and so it does — just through pure intuition — make sense that costs are rising for the university as well,” he said. “But it would still be a very healthy and a professional thing to just have that transparency and know what our money is going towards.”