[dkhar]

The main idea of this story is that private colleges are like used cars: They've got a high sticker price that's almost always haggled down "because you're not just any student/customer." The resulting anchoring effect makes people more likely to see private college tuition as a value.

Here's my contribution to the discussion: The article interviews a professor at Wharton (that's part of UPenn, a private college), and one at UMinnesota (a public college) who's advising the college administration to start following the private college model. I did a little snooping, and found out that the author is a Yale graduate. So this is similar to some used car owners (and someone who thinks his dealership should get into used cars) talking about how used car dealerships are deceptive about their pricing.

Edit: I thought a little more about this, and I've decided that this is a pattern caused by information asymmetry. The whole price negotiation game with used car dealerships really stopped being super profitable when the internet made it easy to figure out how much a given vehicle was "supposed to" cost.

I wonder if we could do the same for college tuition...

[infocollector]

How about we start with a law that forces Colleges/Universities to open all information regarding admissions / tuition?

[rahimnathwani]

My instinct is to agree with you, but I've not yet found a reasonable justification for compelling a private company to publish the set of prices with which it has transacted with each of a large number of private individuals.

There may be many reasons you want your scholarship/discount information to remain private. Perhaps you got a great deal, and you don't want your roommate to feel bad if s/he didn't? Perhaps you don't want people to know you paid full price or paid zero, thereby exposing that you are at one end of the wealth scale?

Releasing only anonymised data may help with concerns for individual privacy. Degree-granting institutions are licensed by the government, so perhaps you can argue that releasing anonymised data on this sort is a fair trade for being granted that privilege.

[dkhar]

Well, private colleges are essentially businesses. I'm not sure if the government can mandate them to release information about their... clients?

That said, we don't need super personal data. Summary statistics would be fine.

On that note, the NPR article cites this survey[1], wherein participating private colleges contributed data that was then used to calculate aggregate statistics about students in the US in general.

What we'd want is probably more specific than that. We need per-school statistics, so that trends in how colleges charge and discount may be identified (what if colleges on the East coast are more likely to mark down tuition? What if advertised tuitions are relatively constant, but actual tuition paid varies with cost of living? these are interesting threads to explore). The difference between the average student's tuition after grants and the sticker price, along with the standard deviation of that distribution, would be a good place to start. Quantiles would be even better.

[1] http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/about/pressreleases/2013TDSP...

[xux]

Sure you can, depending on how heavily the industry is regulated. Ex. SEC requires public companies to release certain financial data.

[hueving]

Not even the same ballpark. Releasing the total revenue and costs for a quarter is nothing like releasing the price each client paid.

[Joeri]

It's easy to introduce a requirement that any school that wishes to enroll students backed by government student loans must publish normalized financial data on the cost of tuition. In fact, you could argue that any student loan program which doesn't try to build this understanding is foolish and a waste of money.

[tzs]

You can find out the real costs for most schools by using their online net price calculator. US News & World Reports has a handy page that links to the online net price calculators for the top schools: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/features/net-p...