Big picture, average college costs (so this is including aid) adjusted for inflation had been in a general downward trend since circa 2016-17.
Then during the unexpected inflation spike, this drove down the inflation-adjusted average college cost trend even further, as colleges did not leap to keep pace with the spike.
Then this cycle, it looks like the average might go up in inflation-adjusted terms (although we won’t know for sure for a while because aid data is not immediately reported). Probably not nearly enough yet, however, to reverse the total inflation-adjusted reduction that happened during the inflation spike, let alone all the way back to 2016-17.
Just guessing, but I suspect we may at least be due several years of above-inflation average cost increases, on theory colleges will sort of be gradually smoothing in the unexpected inflation spike.
But where they end up in the long term, I don’t know. Maybe we will get back to the trend that started 2016-17, which would be nice. Maybe the recent turmoil in higher ed funding has ended that era, and we may get back to the pre-2016-17 trend of costs increasing faster than inflation. That would be not so nice.