Tuition and fees at some New York City private high schools will cost more than $30,000 for the school year beginning in September 2006, breaking a new barrier in sticker shock for parents.

New York already boasts the highest private school tuitions in the country, but prices at some schools will now surpass even the cost of sending a child to Harvard. Many parents have been notified about the tuition increases over the past few weeks.

Riverdale Country School, located on a leafy oasis in the Bronx, will charge $31,200 for tuition, lunch, and books for grades six through 12. Bus service from Manhattan costs an additional couple of thousand dollars. At the Trinity School on the Upper West Side, tuition for seniors will reach $30,170, which includes a $400 “graduation fee.”

“It all depends on how you do your math, but most schools have gotten up there,” the co-author of the “Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools,” Victoria Goldman, said. She pays to send one of her own children to Riverdale and an other to an Ivy League college.

“This is a lot of money, but when it comes to your kid and education, it’s money well spent – and that’s, of course, if you have it,” she said.

Each school calculates tuition differently, with some including lunch and book fees in an overall number. Others require students to spend money on purchasing a laptop computer.

At $30,000 a year for kindergarten through 12th grade, parents are looking to spend about $400,000 before their children even get to college.

Undergraduate tuition at Harvard this year is $28,752,plus room and board.

“We’re so out of whack that we think that it’s okay to pay more for Riverdale than for Harvard – people around the country are laughing at us,” the founder of the Manhattan Private School Advisors, Amanda Uhry, said.

Ms. Uhry, who charges parents $6,000 to help get their children into private school, said the $30,000-a-year price tag won’t cause most of her clients even to blink.

“The reason they charge as much as they do is the same reason I charge as much as I do – because I can,” she said.

In New York City, private school tuition for first-graders has increased 43% over the past decade and 32% for 12th-graders, according to the National Association of Independent Schools.

The median tuition for high school seniors in New York City is about $27,000, or $10,000 higher than the national average. Washington, D.C. is next most expensive, with a median tuition for seniors at $24,167.

“The reason we’ve increased the tuition is because we are trying to increase faculty salaries,” a spokeswoman at Riverdale, Mary Ludeman, said.

Bloomberg News quoted a letter sent out by the school’s headmaster, John Johnson, that said that school understands “the sacrifice you make in choosing independent education for your son or daughter.” He reportedly said it was important to boost tuition to increase teacher salaries and the endowment to maintain the competitive edge.

A spokeswoman for Riverdale said the school’s endowment is $25 million, which she said is lower than most schools.

Typically, about 70% to 75% of a school’s budget goes toward funding faculty salaries and benefits.

“The thing that kills schools, like everybody else in the world right now, is medical costs. You see double digit increases on a regular basis for medical insurance,” the director of finance for the Hewitt School, Frank DeVine said. Tuition there next year will be $29,100, about a 6.7 % increase over this year.

Most schools said salary and benefits were driving the rising tuition costs.

“When people look at these numbers and wonder what they get for the amount, you’re getting a very low student to teacher ratio and that’s critical to a good education,” Mr. DeVine said.

At most schools about 80% of parents pay the full tuition, according to the executive director of the New York State Association of Independent Schools, Frederick Calder.

“If you don’t raise tuitions, you can’t raise salaries and if you can’t raise salaries than ultimately it’s the faculty that has to carry the school on their back for what are fairly low salaries, at least for New York City,” Mr. Calder said.

Tuition bills next school year at Fieldston, a private school in Riverdale, will reach $28,545 for all grades plus about $400 in expenses for books. This year, the school provided $6.2 million in financial aid to help about 20% of the schools 1,600 students.

“A lot of schools took aggressive increases this year,” the editor of the Private School Insider newsletter, Sandra Bass, said. She added that the average independent school tuition increase typically ranges from 3% to 6% a year, but that increases for next school year were closer to the 4% to 8% range.

Tuition for seniors at the Brearley School will reach $29,700 in September. In Brooklyn, tuition at Packer Collegiate will rise to $24,300 and all students are also required to buy a laptop in fifth and ninth grades. Despite the hefty price tag, tuition only covers about 85% of a school’s expenses. Many schools still rely on annual fundraising campaigns to cover the remaining costs. So, while schools may be taking in more tuition money, they could feel a pinch in other ways.

“I think a lot of parents at a lot of schools will not be as generous in their additional giving as they been in the past,” Ms. Bass said. “I think it’s going to be much harder for schools to fundraise past the tuition.”

The city’s public schools say they spend about $13,000 a student a year, though some city officials say that understates the public funding for each student, which by some estimates reaches as much as $18,000. Mayor Bloomberg has been pressing Albany to obey a court order that would increase spending by about $5,000 a student a year. The city’s Catholic high schools get by on about $6,000 a year.