There's nowhere for the cost of tuition to go -- except up When my 17-year-old son said he might want to apply to colleges on the West Coast, my wife had a flashback. When she was thinking about schools in the fall of 1970, she considered Stanford. Her father told her to forget it. His rationale: the cost of flying coast-to-coast, on top of tuition costs, would have made Stanford prohibitively expensive.