By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — Some of Manhattan's elite educational institutions are about to cost more than a year at Harvard or Princeton.
Trinity School, on the Upper West Side, is set to raise tuition to $38,180 — or 4.3 percent — for seniors next school year and anticipate another $1,000 in fees, the paper reported. The Upper East Side's Hewitt School will charge $38,000 next year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Harvard tuition last year's was $34,976, while and Princeton will charge $37,000 this year — yet more than half of the elite college's students receive need-based financial aid.
The wallet-busting tuitions come as one New York City private school was the first to cross the $40,000 per year tuition threshold — just five years after costs topped $30,000.
The elite Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx will charge $40,450 for high-school students this fall, the Journal reported. The paper conducted an analysis that found private school costs have spiked 79 percent over the past decade.
John Allman, head of school at Trinity, told the Journal that even though they may have enough people willing to pay the tuition, "You may find yourself with a very different population in your school than you want to have."
It has become "increasingly difficult for families across a socioeconomic spectrum to consider Trinity as a viable economic option," he said.
Private school parents don't appear to be staging a mutiny.
The number of children taking the Educational Records Bureau private-school admissions test spiked 10 percent to 4,668 for this past school year, after a slight dip over the last two years, the Journal said.
"I haven't heard a backlash about this," Gina Malin, director of school advisory services for the Parents League of New York, told the paper. "I think parents, they just say, 'OK, this is the price we have to pay for an independent school education.' It's like the price we have to pay for living in New York City. Everything is expensive."
The median tuition for seniors at city private schools this past year was $35,475 compared to the national median of $21,695, according to the National Association of Independent Schools
