The sale of bodily goods or services--"body commodification"--is nothing new among college students. But strides in medical technology, the encroachment of market values on all facets of life, and the reach and culture of the Internet have combined to create a fertile environment for people who want or need to exploit the value of their skin or…

Colleges are not the only enterprises interested in the possibilities of free, online courses. Publishers have begun to investigate whether so-called MOOC's, or massive open online courses, can help them reach new readers and sell more books. For the moment, providers of the classes encourage professors not to require students to buy texts, in…

Making Pell Grants an entitlement and tying the maximum award to a measure of inflation, as President Obama has proposed, would probably yield larger awards and stop the cycle of shortfalls that have plagued the program. The president's plan, which would index the maximum award to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) plus one percentage point, probably…

As higher-education institutions across the country struggle with constrained sources of funds, more than 80 percent of state institutions said they rely on energy-management programs to reduce operating costs, according to a report released by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (Aascu). The report, based on a survey of…

Explaining that tight finances are forcing colleges to rethink spending on information technology, offers 10 strategies to help minimize costs. (EV)

Discusses how the "dot-com" swoon meant that many institutions never took online purchasing seriously, but that some are now seeing significant savings through the practice. (EV)

Discusses how librarians are expressing concern over "bundled" collections of electronic journals from Elsevier Science, saying that the terms of the agreements are unreasonable. (EV)

When a group of concerned citizens placed the sole bid on the auctioned campus of a closing college, the school rejected it as inadequate despite uncertainty about further prospective buyers. (MSE)

Describes the increasing trend of incorporating electronic commerce methods to purchasing systems at colleges and universities. Provides examples from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University (Massachusetts), California State University at Fullerton, and the University of California at Los Angeles. (DB)

College purchasing officers need to dispel their image as penny-pinchers looking for the low bid and purveyors of paperwork who keep employees from the products they want. With competitive bidding and consortium buying, universities have realized significant savings. (MLW)

Increasingly, colleges and universities are using procurement cards, which are credit cards with limited usage, for institutional faculty and staff to make small purchases without going through costly and inefficient purchasing channels. Some concerns include distribution of cards, increased liability, and monitoring of expenditures. (MSE)

Colleges and universities have devised a number of strategies to raise money for computers, including borrowing, courting foundations, reallocating funds from such things as financial aid and libraries, and general fund raising. Knowing the appropriate amount to spend on technology is difficult. (MSE)