Students and families can compare colleges’ tuitions, the pace at which they are rising and the net cost of attending each college on a new Web site the Department of Education made public on Thursday, fulfilling a legislative mandate.  The new lists, required by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, show the institutions with the highest and lowest tuitions, the highest and lowest percentage tuition increases over the last two years, and the highest and lowest net price — that is, the actual price full-time students pay, including room and board, after financial aid like grants and scholarships are taken into account.  In each of several categories — public and private, for-profit and nonprofit, four-year and two-year — the most expensive institutions and those whose costs are rising most rapidly will be required to report to the Education Department why their costs are so high and what they plan to do about it.  “This allows students and families to see the highs and lows of the distributions and highlights those good-performing institutions,” said David Bergeron, a department official.  Information about colleges that are not among the highest 5 percent or lowest 10 percent in their category, he said, can be found on the department’s College Navigator site.  A separate report to be released Thursday shows that community colleges — long seen as the affordable route to higher education — are increasingly unaffordable for American families. From 1999 to 2009, tuition at public two-year colleges increased 71 percent, while the median family income declined 4.9 percent, adjusted for inflation, according to a study by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.  “We’ve gotten pretty jaded about this issue, with people saying, ‘Look how cheap community colleges are, compared with four-year colleges,’ ” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center. “But actually, community colleges, which are supposed to be our safety net institutions, were losing ground even before the economic downturn, with huge tuition increases at a time when family income was declining.”  The Education Department data cover a smaller time period, reporting tuition from the academic year that began in the fall of 2009, but calculating increases from 2006 to 2008.  According to the lists, the average 2009-10 tuition at a four-year nonprofit college was $21,324. But the highest-priced institutions were far more costly: Bates College in Maine had the highest tuition last year ($51,300); Wells College, in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, the largest percentage increase in the two years before that (67 percent); and the Art Center College of Design in California the highest net cost for those receiving aid ($29,672).  A spokesman for Bates took issue with the department’s methods, noting that its price — and that of the other four most expensive schools listed — includes room and board, making for an apples-and-oranges comparison with colleges where tuition is listed separately.  “Bates’s average net price, taking into account financial aid, is below that of more than 400 other institutions,” noted the spokesman, Roland Adams. “Bates’ percentage increase in tuition and fees over the last three academic years is lower than that of more than 800 other institutions.”  Indeed, the data are uneven in other respects as well. The net cost numbers, for example, include only full-time, first-time students who received financial aid, a group that at many colleges is not very large.  But the Web site offers much more comprehensive data than had previously been readily available, and presents it in a user-friendly way, providing a useful window on college costs.  The average tuition at public four-year colleges was $10,747. Pennsylvania State had the highest tuition ($14,416), Northern New Mexico College the largest percentage increase (51 percent) and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio the highest net price ($24,192).  Among public two-year colleges, the average tuition was $2,527, the University of Pittsburgh-Titusville charged more than four times that ($10,430), making it the most expensive in the group. And Sanford-Brown College had the highest tuition ($45,628) among four-year for-profit schools, where the average was $15,661.  In another effort to expand consumer information about higher education, the government will require career and vocational colleges’ promotional materials to show their tuition and fees, and their students’ median debt load, along with rates of graduation and job placement.
The new Web site lists tuition costs for public and private colleges and also notes which ones have the fastest-rising costs.