Study of College Costs and Prices:1988-89 to 1997-98 Volume 2: Commissioned Papers

In the 1998 Amendments to the Higher Education Act, Congress directed the National Center for Education Statistics to conduct a new study of higher education costs paid by institutions and prices paid by students and their families. This report is the final product of Phase 1 of the study, which relied primarily on existing national data and statistical models. Volume 2 of the study contains seven commissioned papers from expert authors in the higher education community. Topics covered by the papers include: difficulty of valid internal cost analyses; "out of control" college costs and its affect on institutions and parents; cost analysis and public policy formulation; trends and issues affecting institutional practices of tuition discounting and enrollment management; cost and price in higher education, particularly as it relates to research and needed data; measurement issues of higher education costs and the 1997 Congressional mandate that brought about the study; higher education's costs; prices; and subsidies from an economic perspective.