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 contains commissioned papers prepared in support of this study and a summary of a meeting convened to discuss these papers. The papers are: (1) "An Essay on College Costs" (David W. Breneman); (2) "Higher Education and Those 'Out of Control Costs'" (D. Bruce Johnstone); (3) "Cost Analysis and the Formulation of Public Policy" (Dennis P. Jones); (4) "Institutional Financial Health: Tuition Discounting and Enrollment Management" (Lucie Lapovsky); (5) "Issues of Cost and Price in Higher Education: Observations on Needed Data and Research" (Michael McPherson and Morton Owen Schapiro); (6) "Measuring Higher Education Costs: Considerations and Cautions" (Michael F. Middaugh); and (7) "Higher Education's Costs, Prices, and Subsidies: Some Economic Facts and Fundamentals" (Gordon C. Winston). Each paper contains references. (Contains 17 tables and 9 figures.) (SLD)