I went to a liberal arts college in the late '80s and tuition there was about $13K a year. Tuition at comparable liberal arts colleges these days is in the neighborhood of $75K, so it's in the neighborhood of a 6X increase (without factoring in inflation). Which is still a fuck ton but not quite as bad as indicated by this post. However: college tuition (especially at colleges like this) is a very fluid property. They offer quite a lot of "financial aid" which is really nothing more than a discounted rate rather than any actual money changing hands, and it's quite typical for a student to end up paying half the quoted rate. A college's tuition can be better regarded as the maximum rate they're going to charge kids from better-off families.