Princeton University, the fourth-oldest American university, plans to charge $42,200 a year for an undergraduate education amid increases in such costs as faculty salaries and efforts to attract minority and low-income students.

The tuition and fees will be 4.9% higher than the $40,213 charged for the 2005-06 academic year, according to a statement on Princeton’s Web site. Last year, the school raised expenses by 5%. The national average is 5.9%, Princeton said, citing statistics from the College Board.

“While a 4.9% increase falls at the high end of the range of percentage increases that the committee has recommended in the past 10 years, we believe that, given the rising costs of higher education and recognizing the strength of our financial aid policies, it is as small an increase as we can prudently recommend,” the school, located in Princeton, New Jersey, said on its Web site.

Rising energy, health insurance, and technology expenses are leading schools to raise tuition, a spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Washington, Tony Pals, said. Universities and colleges also are giving out more student aid, which comes out of tuition, because federally funded aid hasn’t kept pace with inflation, he said.

“Those price drivers have all been increasing faster than college sticker prices,” Mr. Pals said. “While tuition at a place like Princeton might be higher than the national average its institutional aid packages are significantly higher than the national average.”

Princeton has been offering financial aid under a “no- loan” program, which began in the fall of 2001, to attract more students from low-income families. The school eliminated loans for students who qualify for aid, replacing them with grants that do not need to be repaid.

Last year the aid program helped the school generate a record 16,516 applications, 11% of which were accepted for the class that entered in September.

Princeton’s undergraduate charges next year will include $33,000 for tuition; $4,885 for room; and $4,315 for board. Graduate tuition and fees are scheduled to increase by similar percentages, the school said.

Princeton will increase its undergraduate financial aid budget by 10% to an estimated $72 million next school year from $65.4 million this year, Princeton’s director of undergraduate financial aid, Don Betterton, said in a telephone interview.

About 51%, or 2,417 of the university’s 4,700 undergraduates receive scholarships, he said. Individual grants range from $3,000 to $40,000 a year, he said.

Mr. Betterton said 52% of undergraduates, or about 2,524 students, will receive aid next year, according to university projections.

“I always request enough money for scholarships so that we treat all our students in the same way from one year to the next,” Mr. Betterton said.

The average yearly cost of an Ivy League undergraduate education has risen 52% to $41,516 today from $27,264 in the 1995-1996 school year, based on figures from the schools.

Tuition, room and board and mandatory fees broke the $40,000-a-year mark last year in the eight-school Ivy League with increases that ran from as much as 5.5% at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut to as low as 4.3% at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Columbia University, which currently charges $42,584, has the highest costs in the Ivy League. Harvard won’t announce tuition and fees for the next school year until March, a university spokesman, John Longbrake, said in an interview.

Brown University trustees plan to set fees for the 2006-07 school year at a February 25 meeting, according to the school’s Web site. The University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College release tuition figures in March.

“The other Ivies and highly selective schools will certainly pay attention to what Princeton has announced,” the president of a financial aid consultant in New York, Campus Consultants Inc., Kal Chany, said in a telephone interview. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the other schools come in with comparable rates of increase.”