[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.