Note: this is a response from a user who was trying to get access to a particular data set.
The official name of the California data is the "Cooperative
Institutional Research Program" (CIRP), run by Alexandar Astin
at UCLA. Every year the program surveys more than 100,000 college
freshmen in the U.S., and the survey includes a core set of questions that
have remained unchanged. Because the survey has not missed a year since
1967, the data offer a great opportunity to assess historical trends.
Although the official policy of Astin's program is to make the data
available to the public, I have found him difficult to deal with. He cut
back the analysis I wanted performed to its absolute bare bones, took
eight months to perform it, and charged me $500 for a couple of basic
cross-tabs.
After further research, I have discovered that Astin sees his survey
as a tool for college administrators; in fact, he describes himself as an
employee of the American Council on Education, an organization of college
administrators that provides partial funding for the project. If a college
administrator wants to view trends in regard to a particular college
opinion (e.g. college drug use, women's roles, etc.) Astin will provide
an analysis for them that includes data from the college administrator's
own college, surrounding colleges, and the nation. Of course, he charges
a "slight fee," by which he means slight for college institutions, but
pretty hefty if you're paying for it out of pocket.
Astin's management of the dataset is not consistent with a
researcher's interests. Any good social scientist will want to control
for as many potentially confounding influences in his/her analysis as
possible, but to Astin a confounding influence is another potential
variable for sale. So, the more thorough the research that is planned
with Astin's data, the more the researcher will have to pay. As I
learned, if Astin thinks he's giving out too much information he won't
perform analyses for you no matter how much you're willing to shell out.
I hope other people will learn from this experience...
Oh, I forgot to answer part of your question. The data is funded by
the American Council on Education, which gets its membership fees from
public and private universities. For reasons that are not clear to me,
they say they cannot legally release the data to the public sphere.