The difference between the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Applied Engineering and Technology Library and other science-focused libraries is not that its on-site collection is also available electronically. It is that its on-site collection is only available electronically. The idea of a libraries with no bound books has been a recurring theme in conversations about the future of academe for a long time, and it has become common practice for academic libraries to store rarely used volumes in off-campus facilities. But there are few, if any, examples of libraries that actually have zero bound books in them. UNTESTED: Can college students learn as well on iPads, e-books? Some libraries, such as the main one at the University of California at Merced, and the engineering library at Stanford University , have drastically reduced the number of print volumes they keep in the actual library building, choosing to focus on beefing up their electronic resources. In fact, some overenthusiastic headline writers at one point dubbed Stanford’s library “bookless.” But that is “a vision statement, not a point of fact,” says Andrew Herkovic, the director of communications for Stanford’s libraries. San Antonio says it now has the first actual bookless library. Students who stretch out in the library’s ample study spaces — which dominate the floor plan of the new building — and log on to the its resource network using their laptops or the library’s 10 public computers will be able to access 425,000 e-books and 18,000 electronic journal articles. Librarians will have offices there and will be available for consultations. ON THE WEB: Is a campus library valuable? INSIDE HIGHER ED: The joy of stacks Students used to get their engineering and technology books from a collection at the campus’s main library. That collection is still there, and books from it are available upon request. But at the new library dedicated to that specialty, the only dead trees are in the beams and furniture. The fact that San Antonio has actually built a literal version of what many in the industry hold up as symbol of the inevitability of electronic as the prevailing medium in academe may be commendable, but it is not “earth-moving,” says Roger Schonfeld, the managing director of Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit that promotes innovation in libraries and elsewhere. Many libraries, especially science and engineering ones, have started moving their print volumes out of the building and into remote storage. Lisa Hinchliffe, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries and head of the undergraduate library at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, says that her institution, along with several others, has embedded librarians in various department buildings. Their offices in those building, it could be argued, constitute bookless libraries inasmuch as they are places where students and professors go to learn about how to use campus collections that can be accessed from anywhere. More interesting than the fact that San Antonio’s newest library has no printed books in it is the fact that more and more libraries are devoting less space to printed books, and are thus reimagining the physical space of the library, Hinchliffe says. Whether the building houses half of its former print collection or none of it, the evolution of the library as a physical hub is something nearly every library is dealing with. As a shared space for discovery, socializing, and studying, the library is still very much relevant and in demand, says Krisellen Maloney, dean of libraries at San Antonio. That is why the university invested $82.5 million in a new library building instead of just putting librarians in offices around campus, Maloney says. “You study and work in the library,” she says. “That’s how libraries have always been. When people come to the library with books, they’re not necessarily using the books. They’re also there for the services — to consult, get instruction, find content, and use the content.”

With another summer ending, the time has come to ask the perennial question: Could this be the year higher education finally embraces the e-book? Some think that developments since the last buying cycle, particularly the arrival of Apple ‘s iPad computing tablet, might foreshadow an especially good year for electronic texts. CourseSmart, an e-textbook consortium comprising five major publishers, says it has sold four times more e-textbooks in 2009-10 than it did the previous year (although it would not provide the number of copies). CourseSmart would not disclose how e-book sales are going so far this season, saying it was too early, but that it is optimistic. “We expect triple-digit growth to continue,” says Heather Shelstad, director of the consortium. UNTESTED: Can students learn as well on iPads, Kindles? SAVING MONEY: Rent, don’t buy college textbooks Others are more skeptical about whether e-books will finally boom after years of stalled progress. “They’ve been saying that for the last 10 years,” says Nicole Allen, an advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs). One reason it is difficult to parse the prospects for e-books this year is that many other things are happening in the textbook market that make “traditional textbook vs. e-book” a false dichotomy. These days, traditional books have electronic supplements; some electronic texts have print-on-demand options; and for many students, textbook decisions have more to do with renting vs. buying than print vs. digital. The iPad and the e-book It has been a truism for years that e-books are massing at the gates. For the most part, officials are no longer arguing if the college library will transform from a warehouse of bound volumes to a nexus for accessing various digital resources, but when; in last year’s Campus Computing Project survey, 76% of senior campus technology officials predicted that e-books “will be an important source for instructional resources in the next five years.” The explosive growth of online education seems to imply a mainstream acceptance of the computer screen as medium for instruction. And then there is the widely accepted argument that printed textbooks, like other analog vessels, belong to an economic model that no longer makes sense (at least not to many students). Despite the hype, e-books have remained on the fringes of higher education. In 2008, the first year the Campus Computing Project survey started asking about e-book use, respondents said the electronic texts were used in 2.2% of classes. Last year, that percentage “jumped” to 3.5. According to the Student Monitor, a group that does market research on student behavior, e-books accounted for only 2% of textbook sales last year. And while publishers have been increasing the number of titles available in digital, half of students surveyed last spring remained unaware that e-books are even an option. What’s more, the percentage of students who were aware of e-books actually dropped from the previous spring, according to that survey. Digital add-ons, such as Pearson’s Mastering software, have become very popular among professors and de rigueur among publishers. But for the most part, professors are using them alongside print textbooks, not e-textbooks. The only places where e-books are dominant are for-profit institutions such as University of Phoenix , where administrators have required instructors to assign them. (Neither the Campus Computing Project nor Student Monitor data account for students at those institutions.) However, the e-book market has seen some auspicious developments in recent months. In July, Blackboard announced changes to its popular learning-management platform that would allow professors to assign electronic texts more easily — a potential coup for e-books, since Blackboard boasts by far the most popular learning-management platform in the industry and is well-positioned to influence how professors provide course materials to students. ON THE WEB: Blackboard deal aims to galvanize e-texts INSIDE HIGHER ED: ‘The Text Generation’ But the most buzzed-about development with implications for e-books has been the unveiling of the iPad, which, among many other functions, is popular as a reading device. The last version of Amazon ‘s Kindle e-reader was ill-suited for academic reading, according to a handful of institutions that tried it out. But the iPad is touted as a more hip, versatile breed of e-reader — one that college kids are apt to buy for general purposes. And once they own e-readers, they will be more likely to buy e-books, suggested Eric Weil, managing director of Student Monitor, in a July interview with Inside Higher Ed. Half the students who responded to Weil’s spring survey either already owned an e-reader or were interested in buying one. The CourseSmart consortium of publishers, for its part, sees the iPad as a “game-changing” device, equating it to the laptop. “As the iPad captures the imagination of the next generation of students, it will raise additional awareness for the digital benefits and cost savings related to e-textbooks,” says Shelstad. In addition to the iPad’s cachet, Apple ‘s arrival on the e-reader scene portends an avalanche of apps, including ones that could offer academic readers that elusive “added value” that many — including Campus Computing Project director (and Inside Higher Ed tech blogger) Kenneth C. Green — argue are absent from the current generation of e-books. Nick Bilton, a technology writer for The New York Times and adjunct professor at New York University , last week wrote about a new app, called Inkling, that lets students interact around passages of digital text. The app also supports dynamic content from publishers; for example, a three-dimensional model of a molecule that students can navigate via the touch screen. Allen, the Student PIRGs advocate, says that a lack of such features — that is, the tendency of e-textbooks to be “flat representations of print books” — has contributed to students’ apathy toward them in the past. Still, it would be easy to overestimate the effect devices such as the iPad will have on e-book adoption, especially in the short term, says Joseph Esposito, a longtime scholarly publishing consultant. Professors will not assign e-textbooks simply because of the values added by iPad apps, since the majority of students (at institutions that have not arranged iPad giveaways) will not have the iPad, and no professor in his right mind would require his students to buy the $500-and-up device, Esposito says. E-books will probably see a bump in adoption — perhaps a significant one, if CourseSmart is moving as many digital copies as it says it is. But if e-books do win significantly more users this year, it will be primarily because there are significantly more titles available, says Esposito. “We shouldn’t be dismissive of incremental gains by digital text,” he says, “but we shouldn’t be looking for revolutionary gains.” Analog innovations Actually, the textbook-delivery trends that stand to see the greatest gains in 2010-201 have less to do with technological innovation than with economic creativity. Textbook rental services — which give students the option of securing the savings of temporary ownership upfront, rather than taking their chances in the fickle buy-back market — have been around for a while, but they are now viral. The National Association of College Stores says rental programs have increased fivefold among its members since last fall, with about 1,500 campuses now offering the rental option. In a recent press release, the association dubbed 2010 “The year of the rental.” Another novel mode of delivery for dead-tree textbooks that appears to be gaining traction is print-on-demand. Flat World Knowledge, a company that offers digital copies of its customizable textbooks for free and printed versions for relatively low prices, has dramatically broadened its reach, winning over at least one professor at each of 800 different colleges this fall, up from 400 a year ago. Flat World uses generous royalties to persuade “top authors” to write textbooks that subscribing professors can then add to and tweak to their liking; students are then given the choice of getting access to an HTML version of the customized textbook for free, buying a color PDF version for $25, ordering a black-and-white paperback version of the textbook for $30, or ordering a color version for $60. Just like the mainstream publishing houses, Flat World offers a buffet of digital add-ons, such as interactive quizzes, digital flash cards, and the like. These supplements have proven popular among Flat World customers, as they have among users of Pearson and others — a reminder that while e-books might still be on the fringes of academe, e-learning tools have made substantial inroads. This is not to say e-textbooks will fail to become increasingly relevant, even to people like Frank. This fall, Flat World is introducing an e-book version formatted for e-readers. It will cost almost the same as its analog opposite, the black-and-white printed version. Frank says Flat World will be watching with interest to see which option students pick more. As far as how Flat World users have opted to receive their textbook content so far, the least fancy formats have been the most popular. Half have chosen the free, HTML version. Of those who choose to pay, about 70% chose the $30 black-and-white printout, while 15% sprang for the $25 color PDF, and only 3% bought the $60 color paperback. It’s the sticker price, stupid What to make of those decisions? On the one hand, the popularity of the HTML version suggests that students are willing to use screen-borne texts. On the other hand, the HTML version was free. Price, not format, is still the top driver of student textbook-buying behavior, says Allen. E-books have not caught on simply because they are not, in most cases, the cheapest option, Allen says. “From what I’ve been able to tell, the print rental prices are [generally] lower than the e-book rental prices,” she says. And since all e-textbooks are essentially rentals — with access typically expiring after one or two semesters (sometimes less) — they offer no added value over renting a printed textbook as far as permanence of ownership. That, more than a lack of built-in frills, is why rentals are blowing up while e-books are merely slouching toward wider adoption, says Eric Frank, the co-founder of Flat World. “[Textbook companies] are saying, ‘We need all these bells and whistles — then we’ll sell more,’ ” Frank says. But that’s not the key, he says; bells and whistles are fine for the students who are willing to pay for them, but currently that is a decision most publishers are either making themselves or putting in the hands of professors. Students should only have to pay for the frills they want, agrees Allen. Accordingly, Student PIRGs is throwing its weight behind the Flat World model, she says. One major public system is exploring the idea of reducing the cost of textbooks to students by limiting student choice, rather than broadening it. The California State University System announced on Monday a pilot program in which professors in 32 course sections would require their students to buy e-textbooks. As a result, the system would be able to make larger purchases from the publishers at a discount, which would then be passed on to the student. This strategy of buying e-books in bulk in order to save students money on course materials has been used by for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix, and community colleges such as Rio Salado have pursued similar strategies with printed textbooks. In effect, students involved in the pilot would not have the choice between print or electronic, but they would be spending less than if they were allowed to choose. For now, the California State move is just an experiment, and a spokesman would not speculate on whether it could lead to broader proscriptions against printed textbooks in the name of savings. But if there comes a time when California State and other institutions decide to address the high cost of course materials by mandating bulk purchases of electronic texts, that would be a bully year for e-books indeed. For the latest technology news from Inside Higher Ed, follow @ IHEtech on Twitter .

Two years ago, hiring overseas agencies — paid by the college in the form of per-student commissions — to recruit international students was taboo. Few colleges would publicly admit to the practice, which is illegal under U.S. law when it comes to recruiting American students. Today, while ethical qualms persist, and the debate over the payment of per-student commissions still simmers, more colleges have embraced the recruitment strategy — and more still are willing to consider it. “It’s a moving landscape,” says Susan Sutton, associate vice chancellor of international affairs at Indiana University Purdue-University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and associate vice president for international affairs for the Indiana University system. “Two years ago, I would have said, categorically, IUPUI and IU, as a system, do not use agents and will not use agents. End of discussion.” Now, she’s on a system-wide task force to evaluate the use of agents. “We don’t use them at this moment and are unlikely to do so in the next couple of years, but the door has been cracked open. Let me put it that way,” says Sutton. What’s changed? There’s been a recession, for one thing. And college leaders that in more flush times embarked on grand plans to internationalize their campuses have been looking for cost-effective strategies for increasing and diversifying their international student enrollments. These international students are typically full-paying. But international recruiting can be an expensive proposition with little guarantee on return; this being the case, the prospect of paying an outside company a portion of a student’s tuition revenue only after he or she has matriculated has proven an attractive model. RECRUITERS: U.S. colleges find growing market overseas, in Vietnam ON THE WEB: Shifts in grad school enrollment INSIDE HIGHER ED: ‘The Chinese are coming’ “Colleges and universities, a lot of them, are just hungry to internationalize themselves,” says Richard W. Ferrin, president and CEO of World Education Group, an agency and education services company that recruits international students (including with agents) and forges articulation agreements between its partner U.S. colleges and foreign universities. “This is for a variety of reasons, sometimes financial – we want these full-paying international students to help with our budget flows – and even with the best of educational aims, we want a more diverse student body. We’re at a time when U.S. higher education is saying we want to internationalize for educational, financial, social, and political reasons, and most don’t have the budgets to send out representatives from their institutions to go all over the world,” says Ferrin, formerly the president of Salem International University. Seeing the opportunity, big, well-regarded international education companies – including Hobsons and IDP Education – have stepped into the marketplace, and are developing networks of agents to recruit students for U.S. colleges. Another change, and arguably the most significant one, is that a young nonprofit association, the American International Recruitment Council, which formed in 2008, has quickly established itself as a player and has offered a degree of quality assurance to the marketplace. With aims to regulate and professionalize the industry, AIRC certifies agencies that meet its standards. Just last week, AIRC announced the certification of 16 more agencies, bringing the total number of certified agencies to 24, operating in 35 countries. (One agency was denied certification. Per its policy, AIRC declined to disclose this agent’s identity.) “Now there is a large group of certified agents. They have been validated, if you will, they have been vetted,” says Marguerite J. Dennis, vice president for enrollment and international programs at Suffolk University, in Massachusetts . “Now it’s up to us, those of us who are involved in international education, to determine if we want to use them.” “I think this is a tremendous opportunity for the United States,” says Dennis. “Forget my school. Forget any individual school. We have been at a distinct disadvantage for years.” The use of international recruiting agents is common practice for colleges in Australia and Britain , but U.S. universities have reasons they’ve resisted it. For one, federal law restricts incentive compensation when it comes to recruiting domestic students; the 1992 law emerged out of concerns that recruiters would bring in unqualified students in order to collect commissions. While there are no such legal restrictions when it comes to international student recruitment, many have been skeptical of applying different standards offshore. Beyond general questions about the wisdom of commission-based recruiting – there are fears that agents will pass along students who lack the ability to succeed or otherwise would be poor matches for the institution — there’s also a general concern that agents acting on behalf of a college could engage in abusive or unethical practices or misrepresent the institution, undermining its global brand. “We still have lots of reservations about whether we need to do it and whether that would result in students who really should be coming to Indiana as opposed to being cajoled into it,” says Sutton, of IUPUI. “The concerns are that some agents – bad agents, let’s call them bad agents – would gouge the prospective students, and by gouging I mean overcharge them for what they’re doing and act in ways we view as unethical. There are concerns that bad agents would not understand Indiana, and would misrepresent what we are, and therefore that it could tarnish the university name.” On the other hand, “the appeal is this: that no university can be everywhere at once,” says Jim Plunkett , executive director of admissions at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, another institution that does not currently work with agents but is considering it. “The lure of using the international agent — the right one — is that you already have an advocate for your university embedded in that country, someone who knows the culture, someone who knows the language, someone who knows the education system.” The rise of the agent model The ability to distinguish the good agents from the bad is the premise of a standards-setting organization like AIRC, which certifies agencies that have successfully completed a process akin to accreditation, complete with self-study and site visit. “This was the missing link,” says John Deupree, AIRC’s executive director. “Before there was no standards process or quality assurance process. In our view, the biggest barrier to the use of agents has been removed.” AIRC’s number of member colleges climbed past 100 this month. Its members are predominantly small, tuition-dependent private colleges and regional public universities, with a few larger research universities and community colleges thrown in. The most elite colleges are not represented. Many larger, more well-known institutions, both public and private, can recruit effectively on their own. They can invest funds to send their own admissions officers to Beijing or Bangalore, and spend enough time there to build contacts with high schools and prospective students. While not every college will use agents, “the receptivity has grown startlingly fast” – including from the corporate world, says Mitch Leventhal, AIRC’s chair and president, and vice chancellor for global affairs for the State University of New York system. “I have seen a very significant increase in interest from private companies in a variety of fields, as well as private equity firms, that are either looking for places to invest their money or looking to tap into what they see as a potentially large new industry in U.S. higher education, that is, the recruitment space.” “I’ve been visited by at least eight companies, either in private equity or related fields, who have come specifically because they’ve observed the heating up of this market and are trying to figure out if they can serve it in some way. That’s a really significant change that’s happened in the last 12 months,” says Leventhal. He adds: “It’s early, it’s changing quickly, and there’s opportunity. Truthfully, in five years there will probably be some major players who have established themselves, and they may not be companies that exist yet or that we even know are going to be in that spot.” Two companies that are vying to be in that spot are IDP and Hobsons, Australian and British companies, respectively. IDP, which is AIRC-certified, has moved most quickly in building a portfolio of universities, and now has agreements to recruit students for 60 colleges in the United States – including, to take a sampling, Bellarmine University , in Kentucky; Colorado State University; Dean College, in Massachusetts; Duquesne University, in Pennsylvania; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Florida; Guilford College, in North Carolina; John Carroll University, in Ohio; the Johns Hopkins University Global MBA Program; Lipscomb University, in Tennessee; Lyon College, in Arkansas; Mary Baldwin College, in Virginia; Thomas College, in Maine; and the Universities of Hartford, North Dakota and San Diego. One year into IDP’s efforts on this front, “the U.S. school perception of what we do is a lot more open-minded than I was expecting it,” says Mark Shay, the company’s regional director for the United States. “That’s been tremendously encouraging.” Also one year in, Hobsons, which is an applicant for AIRC certification, has signed up 27 U.S. universities as partners, and, at the upcoming NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference (which begins today), it plans to start signing up the next 25 or so (Hobsons, unlike IDP, has not released its list of clients). “We’re being cautious because we want to make sure we get this right,” says Jeremy Cooper, president of Hobsons Integrated Marketing Solutions. “We feel as though we’ve had some key successes this year. For us, it’s just about continuing the pace.” Hobsons’ ultimate goal is to build a broad-based, representative portfolio of 150 to 200 U.S. universities that its network of agents can refer students to; IDP, in five years, hopes to represent 500 U.S. colleges. The partner colleges will pay a flat fee, in IDP’s case, and a proportion of tuition, in Hobsons’ case, after the students are settled on campus (after the first add/drop date for IDP, and the final withdrawal date, for Hobsons). The results for colleges that have contracted with these companies, in terms of increased or diversified international student enrollments, are still to be determined; stay tuned until fall 2011. Many institutions, however, have high aspirations for growth, and see the use of agents as a key component of their growth strategy. Using agents, Leventhal would like to grow the international enrollment of the 64 SUNY campuses from the current figure, 18,164, about 3.9% of the 465,000 students enrolled, to 31,500, which, assuming current enrollment levels, would represent an increase of the proportion of foreign students to 6.8%. The University of Mississippi, which has contracted with IDP, has goals of increasing its international enrollment, currently at 3%, to 4 to 5%, over a growing student body, says Greet Provoost, director of the office of international programs. “We’re very growth-driven,” she says. Provoost adds, however, that the growth in international enrollment is two-pronged. “Number one, yes, it is increasing the brand recognition of the university, which has a lot to do with marketing and putting out tentacles that are working on your behalf, like IDP for example. But I also see it very much as a result of an effort to do what we do internally better as well, to be able to enroll more of the students who apply and who are admitted.” Reservations about the agent model Ethical questions regarding the use of agents, however, are by no means settled. “There is no question that we are seeing more corporate entanglements when it comes to recruitment of international students,” says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “We certainly have no objection in the abstract to arrangements that may involve a profit motive. Certainly the bookstore has been outsourced to profit-making companies and the cafeteria has been. But we have misgivings when it comes to what we view as a fairly core component of the university mission. I think that’s the real crux of our objection and concern, is that unlike the cafeteria, unlike the bookstore, this has to do with one of the most fundamental academic functions of the university. Outsourcing this or subjecting this to the profit motive may well be crossing a threshold we don’t want to cross.” Nassirian cites what’s happened in Australia by way of warning. While Australia is often described as a huge success story when it comes to cross-border higher education – having increased its international enrollment from 228,119 students in 2002 to 491,565 students in 2009 – its system has been strained by the rapid growth. A recent review of the international education sector was spurred partly by collapses of shaky for-profit vocational colleges and investigated a range of complaints involving unscrupulous providers offering low-quality education programs and false and misleading information provided by education agents. As regards to agents, a government report published in February, demonstrates the possibility for abuse when colleges are not conscientious: “During the review some [higher education] providers indicated monitoring their offshore education agents’ activities was difficult and there were suggestions the Australian Government should directly regulate the activities of their education agents. Other providers indicated a disturbing abrogation of their responsibilities, a lack of good business sense or a thorough understanding of the complexities of operating an export business…. It is most concerning to hear that some providers do not believe their education agents are accurately representing them and yet they are taking no action to either cease using such agents or ensure their education agents act in an ethical manner.” On the one hand, says Leventhal, of AIRC, Australia, long a leader in international recruitment, may now have a lesson to learn from the United States – rather than attempt to regulate overseas recruitment agencies through legal measures, the country could turn to a voluntary system of accreditation or certification (per AIRC’s model). On the other hand, says Nassirian, of AACRAO, perhaps the United States still has lessons to learn from Australia’s growth pains: “We may kill the goose that laid the golden egg. American higher education enjoys the highest prestige in the world in terms of desirability mostly because American institutions have been so meticulous in their approach to international students.” The other national association representing admissions professionals, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, includes a blanket prohibition in its standards of good practice against commission-based recruiting; it makes no distinction between domestic and international recruitment. This has long been the case. That said, the association’s admissions practices committee is now considering the issue, with the intention of clarifying its stance specific to the payment of commissions in international student recruiting, says David Hawkins, NACAC’s director of public policy and research. “There needs to be some clarity as to NACAC’s position one way or the other,” he says. Marjorie S. Smith, associate dean and director of international student admission at the University of Denver, remains an interested skeptic; she still has a lot of questions about the use of agents. “This may be naivet? on my part, but I don’t see why we would pay an outside agent to find students for us overseas, when we don’t pay outside agents to find American students,” she says. “To me, there’s no mystery to recruiting international students. It’s not like these companies know how to do what we don’t. It takes a professional staff, just as it does for domestic recruitment, and just as you do for domestic recruitment, you need to know the market, you have to get to know the counselors and you have to make yourself available to students.” Whereas, she says, “When you pay [an outside agent] to enroll a student, you lose some control and you run the risk of misrepresentation. You could get slimed.” “I’m going to watch the growth of AIRC, and their efforts to control the potential negative aspects, and applaud for them and root for them as loudly as possible,” Smith says. “But in the meantime, we’re going to make our investment more directly through scholarships and recruitment travel and social media, and our ever increasing Web presence, and we’ll also continue to work with the dozens of agents that we do – but these are agents who work for the family and not for us.” Much of the recent rhetoric about the use of agents, paid by the college via commission, suggests that those institutions that don’t jump on board the bandwagon will be left behind. But as several professionals point out, institutions don’t have to use agents. At American University, “it’s not our policy to do so but there’s also no need,” says Evelyn Levinson, American’s director of international admissions and chair of NAFSA’s Knowledge Community on Recruitment, Admissions and Preparation (she stresses that she is stating her personal views and is not speaking on behalf of either American or the NAFSA group). “We’re doing a great job on our own.” “From experience, I can say that universities can do really well by using internal expertise,” adds Negar Davis, director of global relations and promotion at Pennsylvania State University , another institution that does not use agents. “They can still be successful and still attract quality students to their campus, who truly understand what they’re coming into.”