NEWTON, Mass. – Crossing the main quad at Boston College, visitors can’t miss the billion-dollar view.

There is Higgins Hall, the recently renovated science center, with its pricey, Gothic exterior. Behind it sits a new, $41 million office building, complete with coffee bar. Down the road, through well-tended grounds, lies St. Ignatius Gate Residence Hall, home to 322 students in suites featuring instant cable and high-speed Internet access.

“I don’t think you can ever overinvest in higher education,” says the Rev. William Leahy, BC’s president. With a $1.15 billion endowment, BC can invest a lot: The school is in the stratosphere of wealth in American higher education.

But the stratosphere is getting crowded.

Forty-seven U.S. colleges and universities now have endowments of $1 billion or more, compared to 17 a decade ago, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Harvard alone has $22 billion, nearly $10 billion more than No. 2 Yale.

The billionaire schools have amassed their wealth through savvy fundraising, shrewd investing and generous tax laws, and they are the envy of the world. Outside the United States, only England’s venerable Oxford and Cambridge are in the same financial class.

In this country, $1 billion has become a benchmark, a point beyond which schools can stop worrying about the day-to-day and dream big.

“It allows a place to take its other sources of support – student revenues or state financial support – and use them as a base,” said David Ward, president of the American Council on Education. “And use the rest as a source of excellence.”

To shed light on how these schools are using their unprecedented wealth and why they still cost so much to attend, The Associated Press analyzed thousands of numbers collected by the federal government and college guidebooks over the past decade.

The AP found an increasingly varied mix of private and public schools in academe’s financial elite, a group spending heavily on new construction and aggressively recruiting top faculty.

They also are a clique that can induce tuition sticker-shock as never before: Despite tripling its wealth over the last decade, the average billionaire college has nearly doubled its price. Tuition and fees at the average private billionaire college hit $29,002 in 2004; at public universities in the group it cost $7,230 to attend the typical flagship campus.

A significant boost in financial aid means many students aren’t paying full freight, yet the costs have provoked criticism that the richest colleges should use more money from their savings than they do now – at most schools, about 5 percent per year.

Some also worry the wealthiest colleges take too big a piece of the financial pie.

The 47 billionaire schools possess nearly two-thirds of the endowed wealth in American higher education. They are indisputably engines of life-improving research but, excluding the branch campuses of billionaire public schools, they educate fewer than one in 25 American undergraduates.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of small colleges,” said Ian Newbould, president of North Carolina Wesleyan College, a school with an $8.5 million endowment that ranks No. 702 of the 741 schools in the college business officers’ latest endowment survey.

“There is the democratization of education, but in fact, there are a large number of students who need support and need resources.”

The billionaire schools, meanwhile, seem flush. But though they are grouped together at the financial peak among America’s 2,300 four-year colleges, they aren’t all alike.

Each of the eight Ivy League colleges is a billionaire, perhaps unsurprisingly, as are other private schools that wouldn’t be hard to guess – Stanford, Duke, Chicago and Notre Dame among them. Yet there also are small liberal arts colleges, such as Grinnell in Iowa, and 14 public universities, up from four a decade ago. The newcomers among public schools include Ohio State, North Carolina and Illinois.

A billion dollars goes a lot farther at a small school than a large one. Wellesley College, an all-women’s school outside Boston, for instance, ranks 39th on the endowment list with $1.18 billion. Purdue University is one slot higher with $1.20 billion, but the Indiana school has 17 times more students.

What all these schools have in common is that – by American standards, anyway – they’re old. Their average age is 168, ranging from 93 (Rice) to 369 (Harvard). Colleges need decades, even centuries, to build a reputation, reap the rewards of compounding investment returns, and produce generations of alumni who can be tapped for donations.

Ask any president of a billionaire college about the endowment and you’ll get a lecture on how little $1 billion really is: Spend too much each year and there isn’t enough left for the future. And many endowment funds are for specific purposes, from scholarships to professorships to landscaping.

That’s why the presidents say their endowments can do little more than put the brake on tuition increases.

The AP’s analysis found tuition and fees rose 63 percent at the average private billionaire school over the last decade, slightly less than the increase faced by students at four-year colleges nationally. The University of Richmond alone plans to raise tuition and fees by $8,330, or 31 percent, to $34,850 next year.

At the 14 public schools on the list – many still dealing with state budget cuts and more dependent on tuition than a decade ago – tuition and fees at flagship campuses are up 106 percent, compared with an increase of 90 percent for students at four-year public colleges nationwide. That translates to an increase of $3,712 at the average public billionaire.

It’s no surprise, then, that the debt loads of students who borrow to attend the billionaire colleges stands above $16,000 at both the flagship public universities and private schools.

Still, for many, billionaire colleges have become more affordable.

That’s partly because the percentage of students receiving loans is down and the percentage receiving grants is up.

The private schools have increased grant aid and tuition discounts by two-and-a-half times in the last decade. That’s money students don’t have to give back.

Private billionaires are meeting almost all of what’s called “demonstrated need” – that is, getting students the cash they must have to stay enrolled. Public flagship schools are meeting 84 percent of demonstrated need.

Princeton recently replaced loans entirely with grants, and Yale and Harvard eliminated tuition for students from low-income families. Among public schools, the universities of Virginia, North Carolina and Michigan have recently implemented or announced more financial aid for low-income students.

“Right now, the wealthiest schools are remarkably accessible to low-income students,” said Gordon Winston, a higher education economist at Williams College ($1.23 billion), which recently reduced or eliminated loan burdens for students from families earning less than about $60,000.

At the wealthiest schools, even middle-class families may qualify for at least some need-based aid, though tuition still doesn’t come cheap. “It’s a sacrifice in terms of the extra things,” said Neale Mahoney, a graduating senior who has attended Brown University ($1.65 billion) on a partial scholarship, and whose parents are both educators. “My parents have never bought a new car.”

In 2002, Boston College joined the small group of colleges that promise to find funding for all accepted applicants. It spends between $55 million and $60 million annually on undergraduate, need-based financial aid.

BC is now “much more attractive to a range of students who might at first be put off” by the school’s list price of $41,950, including room and board, said Leahy, a Jesuit priest who does his bit to keep costs down by declining a salary.

For a school founded to serve impoverished Irish immigrants, the financial aid policy is a source of pride. But no matter how wealthy BC gets, Leahy doubts it ever will stop raising tuition.

“A billion dollars is a great amount of money, but it by no means eliminates all the pressure,” he said, noting the costs of heating oil, health insurance and technology. At BC, endowment income accounts for only 10 percent of the operating budget.

In part, prices rise because it’s hard for colleges to offset costs as a company would, by increasing productivity. And in part, they rise because the market allows it: The average private billionaire school gets four applications for every available slot.

But mostly, prices rise because there are so many things the billionaire colleges want to do.

Wealthy universities “have many more ideas than they have money to spend on them,” said Charles Clotfelter, a Duke economist and author of “Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education.” “If their leaders don’t feel that way, they probably need to be replaced.”

Billionaire colleges and universities:

Some important facts

Using data collected by U.S. Department of Education and several college guides, The Associated Press built a database to analyze the 47 colleges and universities with endowments of $1 billion or more. Some of the AP’s findings:

COST:

? Tuition and fees at the average private billionaire school cost $29,002 per year in 2004-2005, 63 percent higher than a decade ago. The list price of the average public billionaire flag-ship university is $7,230, up 106 percent from a decade ago.

FINANCIAL AID:

? The average private billionaire school meets 98 percent of “demonstrated need” of students through loans or grants. That’s the money students must have to stay enrolled. The average public flagship meets 84 percent of demonstrated need.

? Still, average indebtedness for those who borrow is more than $16,000.

? At the average billionaire school, the percentage of students receiving loan aid declined from 49 percent to 35 percent between 1999 and 2003, the best available figures, while the percentage receiving grants rose from 37 percent to 39 percent.

? At the average private school, 52 percent of students receive some form of grant aid, and the average need-based grant rose more than 20 percent to $19,143. At the public flagships, where all students benefit from state funds that lower tuition, 44 percent get some type of additional need-based aid.

? Public high school graduates comprise 64 percent of students at the average private billionaire college.

GRADUATION RATES:

? Students who attend private or flagship billionaire colleges are significantly more likely to graduate than students at other schools.

? At the private billionaire colleges, 84 percent of students who entered in 1997 completed a degree within six years, compared to 61 percent of all students entering private four-year colleges.

? At the public flagships, 74 percent of all students graduated, compared to 51 percent at all public four-year colleges.

FACULTY AND PRESIDENTS:

? The private schools among the billionaires and the flagship public schools have an average of about 15 percent more fac-ulty than a decade ago, and about 12 percent more students.

? At the average private billionaire, the faculty-student ratio is 8-to-1. At the average public billionaire it’s 16-to-1.

? Average salaries of full professors rose 32 percent at the billionaires between 1996 and 2004, to $124,000 at private billionaires and $105,000 at the public flagship campuses.

? Over the same period, presidential compensation at the billionaire colleges rose 79 percent to an average of $523,000 ($465,000 at flagship public universities).

SOURCE: The Associated Press