How Boston's Universities Got So Expensive — and So Central to Everything

Tuition at Boston University crossed $65,000 a year for the 2025–2026 academic cycle. At Northeastern, the figure topped $63,500. Those numbers did not arrive suddenly. They are the end product of roughly fifteen years of decisions — by university trustees, state legislators on Beacon Hill, and successive Boston mayors — that together transformed this city's relationship with its colleges from an awkward coexistence into something closer to mutual dependency.

That history matters right now because Mayor Michelle Wu's administration is trying to renegotiate the terms of that dependency. Wu has pushed universities toward expanded PILOT payments — payments in lieu of taxes — arguing that tax-exempt institutions occupying hundreds of acres of the most valuable land in the country should contribute more directly to city services. The conversation has reached a more serious pitch in 2026 than at any point in the past decade, and understanding why requires going back to decisions made long before Wu took office.

The Expansion Era and Its Costs

Between 2010 and 2020, Boston's major research universities collectively added more than four million square feet of new building space across the city. Northeastern expanded aggressively along Huntington Avenue and into the South End. Harvard's Allston campus, across the Charles River from Cambridge, began a construction phase that reshaped a working-class neighborhood into a biotech and academic corridor. MIT spinoffs and Kendall Square labs pulled talent and capital northward, but Boston proper felt the pressure in housing costs and transit load.

The MBTA's Green Line — already strained before the pandemic — saw ridership patterns permanently altered by the concentration of students and lab workers along the E and B branches. A 2023 report from the Boston Planning and Development Agency estimated that university-affiliated populations account for roughly 20 percent of peak-hour Green Line boardings between Northeastern's Ruggles Station and Boston College. Infrastructure investment never kept pace. That mismatch became a political flashpoint that Wu inherited when she took office in November 2021.

Meanwhile, housing pressure in Jamaica Plain and Dorchester — neighborhoods where university expansion did not physically land but where displaced residents did — grew severe enough that the city launched the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing plan in 2022. Student demand for off-campus housing in Mission Hill and Roxbury pushed rents upward in corridors that had historically absorbed working families.

The Biotech Overlay

Universities and the biotech economy became so intertwined during this period that separating them is now almost impossible. The Longwood Medical Area — bounded roughly by Brookline Avenue, Francis Street, and the Riverway — houses Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, and dozens of research institutes simultaneously drawing on federal NIH grants and private venture capital. NIH funding to Massachusetts institutions exceeded $3.2 billion in fiscal year 2024, the bulk of it flowing through institutions with Main Street addresses in Boston and Cambridge.

That money built labs and paid postdoctoral researchers and generated spinout companies, but it also inflated rents in the Fenway and made it harder for the city to argue that universities needed more public subsidy rather than less. The political logic of Wu's PILOT push flows directly from that contradiction: institutions enriched in part by public federal dollars occupying tax-exempt city land while the city struggles to fund its schools and its transit system.

The Boston Public Schools system spent approximately $22,000 per pupil in fiscal year 2025 while managing a $750 million capital repair backlog across aging buildings from Charlestown to Hyde Park. That figure sits in constant implicit comparison to what the universities down the road charge and what they hold in endowment — Harvard's alone stands above $50 billion.

What comes next is a formal renegotiation process. Wu's office has scheduled meetings with the Boston Higher Education Partnership through the fall of 2026, with PILOT contribution targets expected to be published before the end of the fiscal year in December. For students arriving on campus this September, the tuition bills will already be set. The longer argument — about who pays for the city that houses all of this — is just getting started.