While the cost of attending Penn will rise next year, the jump is relatively small when compared to other institutions.
Penn's overall tuition increase of 4.4 percent for the 2008-2009 school year is slightly below the average increase at several peer institutions and well below last year's national average at four-year private schools.
The tuition increase, announced last week, is smaller than last year's increase of 4.9 percent. This year's rise is the slightest increase in seven years.
Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Duke and Cornell universities, as well as the University of Chicago, Dartmouth College and Washington University in St. Louis, all had higher increases than Penn this year. The rises at these institutions ranged from 4.7 to 5.3 percent.
Increases at Brown, Princeton, Stanford and Harvard universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were all slightly lower than Penn's, ranging from 3.5 to 4.1 percent.
Yale and Columbia universities have not yet officially announced their newest tuition rates.
Some schools increased tuition by a significantly lower amount than in past years. Stanford's 3.5-percent raise comes after a decade of increases of greater than 4.5 percent, according to the The Stanford Daily.
But like Penn, other universities saw more modest changes. Harvard raised tuition this year by 3.5 percent, compared with a 3.9-percent increase last year.
All of the increases this year, however outpaced inflation. The core consumer price index, a measure of inflation, was only 2.3 percent from February 2007 to February 2008.
Since 2000 - when Penn's increase was the smallest rise in 30 years at 3.4 percent - the cost of tuition, room and board has risen by an average of 4.95 percent a year.
This year's increases at top-tier private schools were below the national increases in tuition at four-year private universities last year, which was 5.9 percent, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Penn's ability to keep the tuition increase relatively small this year is a reflection of the University's faith in donors and a rise in donations to the financial-aid endowment, wrote Penn's vice president for Budget and Management Analysis Bonnie Gibson in an e-mail.
Gibson attributed the rise in donations to Penn's capital campaign, which aims to raise $3.5 billion, with $350 million expected to go toward undergraduate financial aid.
"It is our responsibility to ensure that we help educate future generations of leaders, regardless of economic background," Penn President Amy Gutmann said in a press release.
Smaller rises in tuition at many prominent universities, including Penn, are often geared toward attracting more students from less-affluent backgrounds.
"It's pretty clear that institutions are continuing to do more and more to defray costs, particularly for low- and middle-income students," said Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the Association of American Universities.
The small rise in tuition comes only a few months after Penn announced an expansion in its financial-aid policy. The University also recast its new aid policy the same day it announced the tuition increases.
