...Just ask Osman Rashid and Aayush
Phumbhra, the co-founders of Chegg.com, a company that rents textbooks
to college students. When the two entrepreneurs started Chegg,
then called CheggPost, in 2003, they envisioned a sort of Craigslist
for college campuses, a network of university-based Web sites where
students would buy and sell everything from used mattresses to
textbooks. Like most Internet start-ups of that time, the plan
was to make money from advertising. It didn’t turn out that
way. CheggPost gained some traction on a handful of campuses but
didn’t take off. Still, the experience offered a few valuable
lessons. Mr. Rashid noticed that a majority of the traffic on the
site was from students looking for used textbooks. With textbooks
being the largest expense for students, after tuition and room
and board, and with their cost soaring, that wasn’t surprising...
Drew Gilpin Faust started as Harvard's
president when the university's prosperity seemed limitless. With
its ballooning wealth, Harvard planned almost frenzied growth,
from a building boom into Boston to vast increases in student financial
aid. Billions of lost endowment dollars later, though, Faust faces
a much different reality...But by last fall, the crashing economy
began to pull down even the country's most famous university. Its
endowment fell to $28.7 billion, and the university estimated it
would drop 30% for the fiscal year that ended Tuesday. The steep
decline is particularly difficult for Harvard, which gets roughly
one-third of its budget from endowment earnings. Much of Faust's
time now is spent figuring out how Harvard can weather the downturn,
through layoffs, early retirement packages, cuts in services, even
changes to breakfast menus for undergraduates. She said further
reductions in the endowment distribution next year will mean more
cuts...
..."For a while last year, I wouldn't
go home for like three days," says the University of Wisconsin
at Milwaukee graduate student. "I'd go to work. Go to school.
Come here. Shower. Go back to work." For years, some universities
have dreamed of border-defying online programs that vacuum up tuition
dollars far beyond local students like Mr. Kolberg. But now a growing
number of institutions like Milwaukee are ramping up their efforts
to attract working adults in their own backyards. Commuter-serving
urban universities can't match the marketing muscle of faster-growing,
for-profit, online colleges. What they can try to do is parlay
stronger local brands, cheaper tuition, and blended programs that
shift a lot of class time online into an appealing package for
area adults...
With a fattened GI Bill covering full
tuition and more, the number of veterans attending college this
fall is expected to jump 30% from last year to nearly half a million.
That's left many universities looking for ways to ease the transition
from combat to the classroom. Vets already in school have run into
problems including campus bureaucracy, crowds that can trigger
alarm instincts honed by war and fellow students who don't understand
their battlefield experiences. In response, colleges across the
country are offering veterans-only classes, adding counselors and
streamlining the application and financial aid process...
California's budget mess -- already
leading public colleges and universities to consider furloughs,
enrollment limits and huge budget cuts -- is now hitting low income
students in an unusual way. This month would normally be when those
eligible for Cal Grants would receive official eligibility notification
of their award sizes and money would start moving to the institutions
the students will attend (in many cases only because the Cal Grant
is part of the aid package). Cal Grants are need-based, and are
a key tool for state residents enrolling at public and private
institutions, with the maximum annual grant topping $9,000. But
under the IOU system imposed by the state last week due to the
failure to adopt a budget, Cal Grant recipients are being told
what they probably will receive eventually, with their institutions
currently being forced to consider the possibility that they will
receive warrants that will eventually be worth cash, but that may
not be now...
