After a few moments of review, I'm pretty sure that fafsa doesn't want that list used by the public or make it easily accessible to the public.
If you go to their school search form (https://fafsa.ed.gov/FAFSA/app/schoolSearch?locale=en_EN) it uses autocomplete to provide the filtered data. I didn't feel like looking for too long at the script to see if I could figure out a URI that might give the entire listing, but I'm pretty sure they don't want people using their bandwidth. I will continue looking elsewhere. I'll try to post back if I find something more like what we're looking for.
...I'm back. I found dbpedia.org as a possible source (for this & MUCH more). I also tweaked an example to list all it's universities in alphabetical order and saved the html output for my own use.
I also found
http://infochimps.com/search?query=universities
this site apparently only "deals" with datasets (some free, some not)
I'm still hoping to find a "straight up" web resource that I can ping with queries for JSON.
ahhhh what'ya gonna do!?!? 8)
