Paying for Higher Education under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Sidney Kess, JD, LLM, CPA, James R. Grimaldi, CPA, James A.J. Revels, CPA, and Thomas K. Lauletta, JD

For most students, the price of higher education is steep and getting steeper. Annual increases in the cost of higher education have consistently outpaced the overall rate of inflation, and the Scholarship Workshop projects the average in-state cost of the 2018/19 academic year for a student living on campus will be over $38,000 at a public university and may top $82,000 for a private college. Costs are not limited to undergraduate school, as more and more graduates go on to postgraduate studies. In the 2015/16 school year, colleges and universities awarded 786,000 master's degrees and 176,000 doctoral degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.