Want to know the average financial aid award at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania? The most popular major there? Or the share of its students who make it beyond their first year?

Such answers related to how the school does its job of educating students just got easier to find, thanks to a Web site the school yesterday said it was rolling out in response to U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings' call last year for colleges to give consumers better information.

The site, "SRU Profile: Accountability 2008," can be found online on Slippery Rock's main page at www.sru.edu. It includes a range of data on such topics as classroom environment, cost and financial aid, student engagement and campus life.

The Web site is unique among Pennsylvania's 14 state-owned universities, according to State System of Higher Education spokesman Kenn Marshall.

And it represents the sort of initiative that colleges around the country will be undertaking in greater numbers given pressures on various fronts to provide better data, said Terry Hartle, senior vice president with the Washington, D.C.-based American Council on Education.

Slippery Rock President Robert Smith said he doesn't expect a surge of applications, but the site means those who are interested in his school will have a faster way to get data needed to compare it with other institutions.

"There was never any attempt to keep this information from people, but to find it, you had to know how an institution was organized, what the lingo was," he said. "This pulls it all together."

For the record, the average financial aid package this year for a first-time, full-time undergraduate with need is $7,944, according to the site. The most popular undergraduate major is elementary education and the retention rate among first-time, full-time undergraduates is 77.9 percent.

In September 2006, the Bush administration unveiled aspects of its long-anticipated overhaul of American higher education. Included were calls to scrap the complicated system for seeking financial aid and offering families more user-friendly consumer data.

Ms. Spellings said too many adults cannot afford college and those who make it there have little way to know what they get for their fast-rising bill.

"Over the years, we've invested tens of billions of dollars and just hoped for the best," she said. "We deserve better."

First Published: November 6, 2007, 7:45 a.m.