Tuition.

Reading the chart. Two stories sit on one page. Sticker prices exploded: public 4-year in-state tuition rose 12.13x from 1980 to 2022, and the BLS subindex reaches 13.49x through 2025 — roughly 2.6 to 3.8 times faster than the 3.91x rise in CPI All Items. But that is the published price, before aid. Net of grant aid, what the average student actually pays rose about 4.6x over the same span — only modestly above general inflation. The space between the sticker lines and the net line is what scholarships and grants absorb. The Reality Index headline uses the sticker figure — the published tuition set by institutions, the cleanest market price and the measure consistent with how the index treats every other category. The net-of-aid line (modeled, above) is under consideration as a user-selectable scenario: it reflects what the average aid recipient nets out to, but it averages across students with very different aid and is estimated rather than observed. Note this is the all-student average; middle-class families receive less aid and pay closer to sticker — a reach question we treat separately in the American Dream Index. About 50% of undergraduates attend public 4-year, 28% public 2-year, 16% private nonprofit 4-year, and 4% for-profit (NCES Fall 2023).