The asymmetry nobody mentions
Residency advice for prospective students is almost always the same: stay in state, it is cheaper. That is true at public universities and it is not true at private ones, and the gap between those two facts is large enough to change which programs you should be applying to.
Of the 540 programs on this site that publish both an in-state and an out-of-state rate, 296 are public and 244 are private. Every single one of the private programs charges the same tuition regardless of where you live. Not most of them: all 244.
This is not a discovery about generosity. Private institutions do not receive the state appropriation that subsidises in-state tuition at a public university, so they have no in-state rate to discount from. The premium at a public school is the withdrawal of a subsidy you were never getting privately.
What it actually costs
Medians across the programs reporting each figure. These are published rates before any aid.
| Institution type | Median in-state | Median out-of-state | Median premium | Programs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public | $7,662 | $18,575 | $10,344 | 296 |
| Private | $34,675 | $34,675 | $0 | 244 |
Doing the math on moving
At the median, attending a public university outside your state costs about $10,344 more per year, or roughly $41,376 across a four-year degree. That is the number to hold in your head, because it is the amount you are paying purely for being from somewhere else.
The consequence is counter-intuitive. If you are staying in your own state, compare public programs first and the subsidy is real money. If you are willing to move, the comparison changes shape: an out-of-state public program and a private program are now competing on something much closer to a level field, because the public school has stopped discounting and the private one never was.
So the question is not “public or private”. It is whether you are moving. Decide that first, then compare only the programs that question leaves standing. Every state page on this site lists the in-state rate alongside the score, and every ranking shows both rates on the card, so you can run this comparison directly.
Two further routes are worth checking before you accept a published premium, and neither is in IPEDS: regional tuition-reciprocity agreements, which cut out-of-state rates between neighboring states, and the fact that some public universities waive the premium for graduate assistants. Both are institution-specific, so the published rate is a ceiling rather than a quote.
What a tuition figure leaves out
Published tuition is not what people pay. It excludes institutional aid, which is where private universities do most of their competing, so a private sticker price often overstates the real cost by a wide margin while a public in-state rate is much closer to the truth. Comparing two sticker prices across those two sectors compares unlike things.
It also excludes living costs, which do not care about residency and frequently exceed the premium itself. Where a program reports it, the cost-of-attendance figure on the program card is the more complete number.
This is also why cost carries little weight in our own scoring. Of the seven inputs in the model, published tuition enters only through the return-on-tuition term, at a small share of the total. Cost is on these pages because it matters to you, not because we think it measures quality. And a figure this easily misread should not be moving a ranking.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure in this guide is computed at build time from the same federal IPEDS data behind the program rankings, so it moves when the data moves rather than being typed in once. Wage figures come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release. Certification rules come from the issuing body’s own page, with the date each was checked on the certification pages.