Entries in On Campus by Holly Hacker

The sticker price at Pennsylvania State University runs about $30,000 a year for in-state students. At Swarthmore College, it’s nearly twice that. Yet Swarthmore ends up being cheaper for most students. That’s because this private liberal-arts college near Philadelphia offers many families a hefty discount, bringing down the average cost to even less than taxpayer-subsidized Penn State’s.

This kind of information used to be hard or impossible to find, because colleges don’t always want people knowing what they really cost—or that some families may be paying a lot less than others. But now the U.S. Department of Education collects this information, and we’re making it available in even more detail through our Tuition Tracker database.