On Friday afternoons between work and rugby practice, Brittany Wolfe would rush to the campus library hoping copies of her advanced algebra textbook had not all been checked out by like-minded classmates. It was part of the math major’s routine last quarter at the University of California , Los Angeles: Stand in line at the reserve desk in the library’s closing hours with the goal of borrowing a copy for the weekend. The alternative was to buy a $120 book and sell it back for far less. If she could sell it back at all. “It’s like this terrible game of catch your books when you can,” said Wolfe, a new graduate who estimates she saved $800 a year using books on reserve and who now shares textbook tips as a counselor to incoming UCLA students. “It’s frustrating when you’re already stressed about school. Being stressed about textbooks doesn’t seem right.” Maybe, just maybe, relief is on the way. A new federal law requires publishers to provide textbook price information to professors and calls on colleges to identify course textbooks during registration, giving students more time to shop around. Experts call it a step in the right direction, but not a game-changer. ‘OLD SCHOOL’: Arizona college cuts book costs the old-fashioned way PROFESSORS: Some stopped from cashing in on textbooks At the same time, a robust online marketplace of used books and recent inroads by textbook rental programs give students more options than ever. The prospect of digital books and slow-but-steady growth in free online “open” content loom as developments that could upend the textbook landscape and alleviate the perennial problem of rising prices. “Change is coming, but it’s not going to happen immediately,” said David Lewis , dean of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis University Library and assistant vice president for digital scholarly communications at Indiana University. “If you’re in junior high school, you can be sure it’ll be better. If you’re in high school, there’s a shot. If you’re starting college as a freshman, you might see it as a senior. It’s on more and more people’s agenda.” According to a 2005 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, college textbook prices increased at twice the rate of inflation over the previous two decades, though not as dramatically as tuition. More recent data from the National Association of College Stores show textbooks costs climbed 14% from the 2006-2007 academic year to 2008-2009. A 2010 survey by the group found students spent an average of $667 per year on required course materials including textbooks, although other studies have put the figure at about $900. In 2008, Congress responded by including textbook-affordability provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Along with the price-disclosure clause meant to push professors toward cheaper options, it requires publishers to offer textbooks separately from extra items like workbooks and CDs. The practice of “bundling” products leads to markups of 10 to 50% and makes books harder to sell, according to the Student Public Interest Research Groups, which pressed for the reforms. “We have more lower cost options than ever before, and professors are going to have more information than ever before,” said Nicole Allen, textbook advocate for the student PIRGs. Like the music and media businesses, the textbook industry has been revolutionized by the Internet. Although used books have long been an option for students, the Web opened up a world of bargain-hunting beyond the campus bookstore. These days, sites such as BIGWORDS and BestBookBuys let students search several online stores at once. The 13th edition of the seminal textbook “Marketing Management,” which lists for $190 new, can be had for as little as $19.99 used. More recently, textbook rental sites such as Chegg, BookRenter and CollegeBookRenter have arrived, offering rentals at roughly half the cost of buying. Their business model — Netflix goes to college — has prompted college bookstores and publishers to play catch up and offer rentals themselves. Textbook publisher Cengage Learning began renting directly to students last spring and has expanded its online rental inventory to 3,000 titles. Campus bookstore operator Follett will introduce rentals at more than 800 bookstores this fall, and Barnes & Noble will do the same on more than 300 campuses. Earlier this summer, BookRenter, which has contracts with Amazon.com and other online booksellers to fill orders, announced that more than 75 campus bookstores would use its platform to rent textbooks. Chegg keeps its own inventory of nearly 5 million books at a warehouse outside Louisville The start-up aspires to forge direct relationships with students, shipping products in their own packaging, offering a liberal return policy and promising to plant a tree for every order, said CEO Dan Rosensweig , a former Yahoo executive. Behind the scenes, publishers get a share of the rental revenue — something they can’t say about used book sales. Open access textbooks pose a bolder challenge to the status quo. The start-up Flat World Knowledge contracts with authors to write new textbooks and publishes them for free under an open content license, allowing professors to edit the raw material and add their own contributions while giving students access to a Web-based HTML book. Last fall, about 480 professors adopted one of the company’s initial 10 business and economics titles, said co-founder Eric Frank. About 1,200 professors are expected to use 22 titles to teach 95,000 students this fall. The company is betting students will pay a reasonable price for greater convenience. Flat World’s revenue comes from selling everything from $30 black-and-white copies of its books to $3 audio chapters, as well as study aids like digital flash cards. About 55% of students are buying something at this point, Frank said. So far, the main drawback to open access is the dearth of titles, said Albert Greco, a professor at Fordham University ‘s Graduate School of Business Administration and an authority on the textbook publishing industry. Greco and others forecast a major shift in the next five years to digital textbooks, which already cost about half as much as new print editions on CourseMart.com, a kind of textbook iTunes launched in 2007 by the major textbook publishers. That would doom the used book and print rental marketplace, Greco said. As for immediate relief from the new price disclosure law, Greco said it won’t do any good for students unlucky enough to have four courses with brand-new books. “Whether it will help students comes down to, ‘It depends,’” he said. Sophie Stanish, a junior at Fordham University in New York, fumes about paying $200 for a new math textbook she couldn’t sell back and a $10 short-story collection that fetched 75 cents at trade-in. She likes the concept of Fordham’s “E-RES” program — short for “electronic reserve” — in which professors scan sections of textbooks to the extent allowed by copyright law and then put the material online for free. But, she said, “I can’t read off a screen and retain the knowledge as well. It’s a personal thing. I like to highlight.” Other colleges seeking to provide relief have adopted textbook loan programs. At City College of San Francisco, Kathy Gill said she misses class to line up early for a popular loan program for students on financial aid. The limit is two loaned books, so the business major still shops online for used and rental options each semester. “You do get a little bit of a break,” Gill said. “Every little thing helps.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

LAS VEGAS — The annual convention of the Career College Association was just gearing up for the day Thursday when word started circulating that the U.S. Senate’s education committee planned to start this month a series of hearings on the increasing flow of federal student aid money to for-profit higher education . It was a stark reminder — in case anyone here really needed it — that the rapidly growing college sector faces a level of federal scrutiny probably unmatched since the early 1990s, when Congress approved a set of changes to the Higher Education Act aimed at reining in perceived abuses of the financial aid programs by what were commonly referred to as “fly-by-night trade schools.” Just how much today’s environment felt like d?j? vu from 20 years ago depended on whom you talked to here. To many financial analysts, investor types and others who focus on stock prices or otherwise take a short-term view, the mood was one of steady-state alarm, focused on the cloud of intensified federal regulation that has loomed over colleges for the last year. Those in this group believe that the for-profit sector has a target on its back, with a coalition of consumer advocates, short-selling investors (who profit if stock prices fall), and ideological government bureaucrats pushing an aggressive, activist agenda. To some observers who’ve worked in and around the industry longer, though, the current round of federal scrutiny (in the form of potentially tough new rules) — while unfair in their eyes — is a far cry from the ’90s, for a few reasons. First, they argue, for-profit colleges are too embedded in the fabric of higher education, and too essential to meeting President Obama’s goals for increasing the country’s college completion rates, to be dealt with in a way that would seriously damage their ability to contribute to that effort. FOR-PROFIT: Sector leads way in e-textbook use COLLEGE BLOG: New student group support for for-profit association Second, during the purge of the early 1990s, for-profit colleges were singled out for scrutiny, with policies put in place that focused specifically on reining them in. This time around, while some federal policymakers clearly have special concerns about for-profit colleges, higher education leaders in all sectors are feeling (and in many cases bristling at) heightened scrutiny from federal, state and other policymakers who see higher education as underperforming and costing students and taxpayers alike too much. “I don’t know anybody in our sector who doesn’t think that the ’92 amendments, and all the trauma they brought about, ultimately had a positive outcome and changed the nature of quality assurance in this sector for the better — though it was clearly something we resisted at the time,” said Elise Scanlon, a Washington lawyer who spent nearly 20 years as an accreditor of for-profit colleges. “Right now it’s hard to see what could come out of this round that would make things better for us, but it is clearly part of a push for better information about quality in all of higher education, at a time of increasingly scarce resources.” Mood of the meeting By many measures, the advocates for for-profit (or “private sector,” as they prefer to call it) higher education who gathered here for the annual meeting of the sector’s main advocacy group could be feeling good. Enrollments in the institutions have grown to nearly 10% of all postsecondary students, and the economic downturn of the last year has enrollments booming. The exhibit hall at the meeting here was bristling with companies of all sorts seeking to sell their services to the institutions, a reflection of their steady and sturdy growth. Bottom line (as it were), business is booming. And yet, that very same enrollment growth — and the fact that it is driven in significant part with Pell Grants and federal student loans — has given new and added urgency to consumer advocates, federal regulators, and others who believe that the for-profit institutions are charging students too much for an education of inferior quality. (A series of critical news media stories have focused on dubious practices.) Those concerns have been at the forefront of the Education Department’s push since last winter to consider a new mechanism for ensuring that vocational programs are helping their graduates find “gainful employment,” among other rules aimed at bolstering the “integrity” of the federal financial aid programs. The department’s favored approach, which would judge programs based on a ratio comparing the incomes of graduates to their monthly payments on their student loan debt, has been vehemently opposed by many career college officials, who say that instituting such a policy could force the closure of many programs and potentially cut off access to college for tens if not hundreds of thousands of students. Lobbyists for and leaders of the colleges have been feverishly opposing the gainful employment regulation (as well as some of the department’s other expected rules), arguing that department officials do not have sufficient evidence and/or justification to support the approach, urging the Obama administration to reconsider. COLLEGE: What if higher ed just isn’t for everyone? OBAMA GOALS: Community colleges like new attention They appear to have made at least minor advances in slowing down the department’s progress in recent days. On Friday, the Office of Management and Budget placed a cryptic note in the Federal Register concluding that the department’s proposed program integrity rules could have a major economic impact, a designation that requires the Education Department to strengthen the evidence it must provide to justify the need for the regulation. In announcing a June 24 hearing (and “a series” of others to follow) by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the panel’s chairman and long a critic of corporate higher education, cited on Thursday the rapid expansion of for-profit colleges and of the federal student aid funds flowing to them. “Students at for-profit institutions are borrowing more, and more frequently, than their peers at nonprofit schools, and according to the Department of Education, one in five students who left a for-profit college in 2007 defaulted on their loan within three years,” the committee’s news release said. “We need to ensure for-profit colleges are working well to meet the needs of students and not just shareholders,” said Harkin. “We owe it to students and taxpayers to make sure these dollars are being well spent.” For-profit college leaders said they welcomed the chance to tell their story. “Nontraditional students are the new tradition in higher education, and federal student aid is helping millions of working adults get the skills and abilities they need to compete in a global workforce,” Harris Miller , president of the Career College Association, said in a statement. “For these students to be successful, however, change is needed. Private sector institutions are bringing important innovations to postsecondary education, and we welcome the opportunity for a full and open exchange with the committee. These hearings will give our inclusive educational institutions an opportunity to address myths with facts and figures.” To critics of the colleges who see them as under siege from federal policymakers and others, that may sound like bravado. But it’s a view shared by some others who’ve seen for-profit higher education survive previous tough scrutiny, as in 1992. “Back then, lots of people said, ‘Oh my god, the world’s going to end, it’s going to put us all out of business,’” Nancy Broff, a Washington lawyer and former general counsel of the Career College Association, said of the 1992 renewal of the Higher Education Act. “The reality is that this is a very adaptable and resilient group of people and institutions, and they have learned to adapt. And they will this time, too.” Leaders in the sector express confidence that even as federal policymakers seek greater oversight of the institutions, they will avoid steps that could severely impair the colleges’ ability to meet Americans’ demand for higher education, especially at a time when many public institutions are cutting their enrollments because of budget gaps. The country cannot come close to President Obama’s college completion goal without help from the private sector colleges, they say. “The long-term trend is that we need more [higher education] capacity,” said Daniel Hamburger, president and chief executive officer of Devry, Inc. “In the end, I’m confident that smart people will generally find solutions that are in students’ best interests.”

A few years ago, any discussion of the master’s in business administration would begin with discussions of scandal and mismanagement. Look at instances of accounting fraud at Enron and WorldCom : MBAs behaving badly. A president of the United States with mixed approval ratings and plenty of opponents in his own party: an MBA whose leadership skills seemed lacking. Business school discourse today has a new set of topical lessons, emphasizing the roles played by MBAs in precipitating the global recession and creating financial products that benefited corporations but hurt consumers. “When we bring students into business school, we narrow their vision,” says Stephen Spinelli, president of Philadelphia University and co-founder of the Jiffy Lube auto service company. “We teach them to focus with increasing blinders until they have pinpoint recognition, but that limits what they can see on the periphery.” A much-maligned concept like mortgage-backed securities, he says, “in its construct … could be taken as being sound — a hard asset that has clear value.” With broader perspective, they’re tougher to define and much riskier than they might seem. “You become dislocated from the person and their ability to pay that loan, the value of the property, what’s happening in the neighborhood around that property and what’s happening with the job market in that city and region.” The financial crisis has administrators and faculty at business schools around the country rethinking that narrowing approach. Courses and curriculums are being revised to avoid building silos in business schools and students’ minds. Words — and ideas — like globalization, innovation and sustainability are taking hold. Though he first started thinking about broadening students’ perspectives a decade ago while serving as vice provost at Babson College , Spinelli says that his ideas solidified as he watched investment banks crumble and ordinary people face foreclosure. “If we don’t teach people to sort of look around and have greater peripheral vision, then we’ve just set ourselves up for the next crisis,” he says. In the fall of 2011, Philadelphia will roll out a revamped MBA program that will emphasize collaboration with the university’s engineering and design schools. Business students will work on hands-on projects with students in other fields, all with the aim of preparing them to collaborate once on the job. “We used to think it was highly collaborative when marketing and finance were working together,” Spinelli says. “Now we see that partnerships need to be much broader; three-dimensional collaboration needs to be taught.” Yash Gupta, dean of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, has a similar perspective. “What has happened in the last 18 months has shown that you cannot manage a complex system by dividing it into smaller pieces and optimizing those pieces without considering the whole,” he says. “You cannot build an organization by simply maximizing shareholders’ value. Customers, employees, the general public are important.” BEFORE COLLEGE: In-school banks dispense financial sense In building a curriculum at Carey, which spun off from Hopkins’ School of Professional Studies in Business and Education in 2007, Gupta looked to industry for recommendations. Among the abilities and skills companies said they wanted from their employees: adapting to change and being flexible; critical thinking; a broad worldview; connecting invention with innovation; and linking content to context. All of those things, Gupta says, will be interspersed throughout the global MBA program that Carey is beginning this fall. Rather than simply having one class on ethics or decision making as some other schools do, the curriculum will include those skills throughout. “We’ll teach students about decision making — behavioral, rational, how the brain functions — in the first year, but we’ll also give them chances to make decisions,” he says. “We’ll bring in CEOs or prominent academics to talk about ethics and ethical concepts, how managers sort things out and decide which decision is the right decision.” Carey will treat globalization similarly. Rather than taking a few classes on international business or an optional specialization, all students will work on projects in the developing world and spend time learning to work with people from different backgrounds. The school is taking the right approach, says John J. Fernandes, president and CEO of the AACSB: Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the world’s largest business school accreditor. “You can’t look at things as compartmentalized,” he says; everything needs to be interconnected, and everything must be contextualized to everything else. “After Enron and WorldCom, everyone said, ‘Let’s teach ethics,’ but they did it in the corner as this separate discussion,” Fernandes says. “But it is best taught across every business discipline because they all have different ethics challenges.… It’s best taught across everything we do.” At Harvard Business School , where administrators insist that ethics has always been incorporated throughout the MBA curriculum, it became clear that there was a need for students to get a solid dose of ethics. In 2004, the school began requiring all students to take “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” during the second term of their first year. David A. Garvin, a professor of business administration, describes the course as “a way to give students a sense of the responsibilities that they will have to all these different stakeholder groups.” With shareholders, they’ll have to worry about fiduciary responsibilities. With customers, “information asymmetries” (as Garvin explains it, “Under what circumstances do you need to disclose?”). With employees, students will be educated about treating them fairly. With the public at large, MBAs’ responsibilities may be even greater — to deal with issues like child labor and freedom of speech. Though these were all pre-financial crisis concerns, the high-profile ethical lapses that helped precipitate the downturn have only intensified the sense that MBA programs need to do more to create ethical graduates. Students in Harvard Business School’s class of 2009 drafted and spread “The MBA Oath,” a brief code of ethics that has been signed by more than 2,500 MBAs and business students. In conducting research for Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads , a book published last month, Garvin says he heard from executives and deans who, after well-publicized accounts of unfair business practices and gigantic post-bailout bonuses, hoped to see ethics education ramped up. “There was a sense of a greater need in helping students understand the roles, responsibilities and purpose of business and business leaders.” ON THE WEB: The B-school glass ceiling INSIDE HIGHER ED ARCHIVE: De-departmentalizing biz school Executives and deans also told Garvin that they saw a need for students to better understand “the limits of models and markets — risk, restraint and regulation,” he says. Before the economic crisis, they came up with an even lengthier list of near-universal needs: 1. Having a global perspective. 2. Developing leadership skills. 3. Improving integration skills. 4. Understanding organizational realities and implementing them more effectively. 5. The ability to act creatively and innovatively. 6. Thinking critically and communicating clearly. None of the needs are too surprising, but they are tough things to teach that business schools must continue working on. Creativity and innovation are at the core of a new report from the AACSB, in which a task force of deans, university presidents and business leaders calls on business schools to play a larger role in innovation. Although business schools are “built to go in a lot of different directions, and we as an accrediting body don’t try to push them one way or the other,” says Fernandes, the association’s president, innovation is something administrators and faculty should be thinking about. “If the light’s not already turned on, it turns that light on for them, that they should apply an innovative intention to their strategies.” Business schools don’t have to be hotbeds of invention, just places where students and faculty develop better processes and products. Robert S. Sullivan, dean of the Rady School of Management at the University of California at San Diego, points to Apple ‘s creation of devices like the iPad as the sort of thing business schools ought to be training students to do. “The technology in the iPad is not a new invention,” he says, “but Apple looked around the corner in terms of figuring out what people want without necessarily asking them.” And the products that business schools must train students to develop aren’t just glitzy gadgets or risky financial instruments; they’re things that will benefit humanity — business schools hope. “If the world has shrunk, then business schools must solve the world’s problems,” says Gupta, of the Carey School. People who face challenges of “poverty, education, health: these are going to be my customers and employees tomorrow, so business schools must help them, too.”