Private colleges offered an average $23,560 in scholarships this year
The campus at Hofstra University in Hempstead. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
If private college tuition is giving you sticker shock, how about a half-off sale?
That’s what many independent institutions offered this year, with scholarships for first-year students averaging 57% off published tuition costs, up from about 48% nine years ago, a new report shows.
A total of 258 private, nonprofit colleges and universities, including two on Long Island, participated in the survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, which published its report this week.
It found that for all undergraduates who received tuition breaks in 2025-26, the average grant was $23,560. Nine out of 10 first-year students and 84% of all undergraduates received grants, the group said. By contrast, in 2016-17, only 78.3% of all students received aid.
Those figures appear to mark historic highs since the business officers' association started publishing its annual survey in 1994, though the numbers are preliminary estimates, the group said.
The figures only include grants offered by schools, not from federal, state or other sources.
The more generous discounts come as colleges compete for a dwindling number of students, attributable to falling birth rates during the Great Recession about 18 years ago, among other factors.
The new figures are good news for cash-strapped families, though with fewer tuition dollars coming in, some schools could find it harder to fund their current operations, the association reported.
“The No. 1 message that we have in this report is, definitely apply for financial aid. There’s literally an 8-in-10 or 9-in-10 chance that you’ll get aid from the institution, regardless of your income or background,” said Ken Redd, the group's senior director for research and policy analysis. “The price you see listed isn’t ultimately the price you have to pay.”
Local impact
Colleges in the study’s “Mid-East” region, which includes New York, were slightly less generous overall, though with 61 participating schools in the region, it’s difficult to generalize, Redd said. Those schools reported that in 2024-25, about 8 in 10 students received grants that covered an average 47% of tuition for all students, including those who did not receive aid, Redd said.
Figures for 2025-26 were not available.
In addition to New York, the region also includes New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
The participating colleges included Hofstra University in Hempstead and Molloy University in Rockville Centre, as well as Columbia University and Princeton University. The report did not specify the aid amounts offered by each school.
At Molloy, Marguerite Lane, vice president of enrollment management, said the school offers grants that average about 50% of tuition. Annual full-price tuition at Molloy will be $41,610 next year.
The school strives to make education affordable for its students, especially those who are the first in their families to attend college, she said.
“We don’t want sticker shock,” she said.
“We want to attract students, we want to give them the opportunity and make it affordable,” Lane said, “but at the same time ... we certainly need to strike a balance where it's affordable for students and it's not cost-prohibitive, but yet we can continue to offer them the type of education that they really need.”
At Hofstra, full-price tuition will be over $60,000 next year.
One recent Hofstra graduate, Matthew Mandolese, said he was grateful for the scholarships he received, which included grants based on grades, essays and other factors. The grants were “deeply impactful,” he said.
“You think of private school as more expensive, but the scholarships really offset that in my opinion,” said Mandolese, an accounting major who now works for a Big Four accounting firm.
The participating colleges estimated they would collect an average of $24,344 per student in net tuition revenue in 2025-26, down about 0.4% from the previous year, according to the report.
With demographic trends indicating enrollment is likely to decline in the coming years, schools that depend heavily on tuition revenue rather than endowments could face painful choices between offering the discounts that attract the most sought-after students and needing to make cuts or increase enrollments to balance their budgets, said Stuart Rabinowitz, who retired in 2021 as president of Hofstra.
Institutions, he said, should be “devoting tremendous energy to building their endowments so that they don't have to depend on net tuition revenues, because the result of depending on net tuition revenue is going to be disastrous in the next decade. ... They're not going to be able to keep up the same level of expenses.”
Maura McDermott covers education. Since joining Newsday in 2012, she also has worked on the investigations team and covered real estate and the business of health care.
