Somewhere in storage, I have a T-shirt that has written on it the following:

“This T-shirt cost me $70,123, and I’m worth every penny.”

The number represented a four-year tuition at Harvard in the mid-1980s. The annual announcements of tuition increases, analyses about how they meet or exceed the core rate of inflation, and their increasingly creative justifications are one of those news stories which tend to be underreported in these days of the conservative tabloid media.

But a funny thing has happened the last few years. Whereas the Ivy League and small New England colleges such as Bennington have been the leaders in high tuition rates, other universities are supplanting them.

Last year, George Washington University, located a few blocks from the high-security compound which The State Department has become, took over as the most expensive university to attend in America. It wasn’t necessarily because of the quality of education, but it was a combination of factors, not the least of which was the expense of finding off-campus student housing in a city where real estate prices have been climbing due to speculators and developers.

Today, it was revealed that the most expensive university in the state of New Jersey wasn’t Princeton. Instead, that title has been taken over by Drew University. This was because Princeton did not announce a tuition increase, although there was a 4.2 percent increase for Old Nassau’s room and board fees.

Currently, only one Ivy League school is in the Top 10 (Columbia University, now ranked eighth). Is that because the schools reached a “How much is enough?” tipping point, or alumni/ae pressure, or the realization that being on a Top 10 tuition list was not desirable?

I’ll give some credit to my alma mater for this. A few years back, Harvard implemented a program for which students, whose families made less than a certain amount of income, could attend for free, given the fact that costs were making it well nigh impossible to increase diversity at the school.

You can see this in the monumental 31.4 percent increase that the University of Richmond announced in 2005; Richmond is now the second most expensive school behind George Washington. The school has aggressively covered income shortfalls with loans and grants, much like Ivy League schools have for the last 30 years.

What troubles me, however, is that few people in the media, academia, and the government have asked the tough questions about runaway tuition increases. I remember some 20 years ago when Ralph Nader asked a Harvard student forum many of these same questions, and requested that students ask administrators exactly what they were receiving as a result of the increase.

But even Nader didn’t address the 800-pound gorilla in the room that afternoon: the United States has the most expensive higher-education system in the world. Even with that, new graduates now have to compete with people from India, Russia, and China for employment.

Which makes you wonder if paying all of that tuition is ultimately worth it.