Here's What A Single Course Costs A 4-Year Student At The Most Expensive College In The US

In the last decade, college tuition has increased nearly 80%.

In fact, there are 50 US schools that charge over $60,000 a year, or more than $200,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree.

This summer, Business Insider determined that Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California is the most expensive school in the US.

Full time undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd pay $48,315 every year in tuition. That means they pay $193,260 over the course of four years for tuition alone.

After a little research and math, we figured out that for just one course alone, Harvey Mudd students paying sticker price fork over $4,494.

Here's how we got to that number:

• We looked at Harvey Mudd's website and found that there's a requirement of 128 credits to graduate. We then read the school's course catalogue to determine the number of credits for a typical course. Most Harvey Mudd courses count for 3 credits.
• We divided the number of credits needed to graduate (128) by the number of credits per course (3), to get the number of courses a student needs to take before graduating (43).
• Our last step was to divide the 4-year cost of tuition ($193,260) by the number of courses needed for graduation (43), which gave us an estimate of the cost of a single course at Harvey Mudd ($4,494).

This number isn't perfectly applicable to every Harvey Mudd student. Costs differ greatly student to student, depending on factors including the course requirements of their major, if they're receving a scholarship or financial aid, if they study abroad, or if they graduate early.

Although Harvey Mudd is the most expensive school in the US, the cost of one of its courses is fairly low compared to some of the other most expensive schools. This is because students at Harvey Mudd have to take more courses to graduate than students at some other schools. The more courses a student has to take, the less a single course is going to cost.