The scene in the exhibit hall of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities’ de-glitzed 2013 annual convention. (Photo by Michael Cooney)

At the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities’ convention in Las Vegas last year, a vendor’s booth in the exhibit hall featured a scantily clad woman in a mermaid costume who was dangling her tail into a giant water tank. In 2011, when Apscu held its convention outside Dallas, attendees could get their photographs taken with a real steer.

The most extravagant it got in the exhibit hall for the 2013 annual convention was a golf-swing simulator. The de-glitzing of the convention hall was all part of the tone that Apscu’s president, Steve Gunderson, is trying to foster for the association.

Mr. Gunderson said the group had asked vendors to exhibit with “conduct appropriate for the higher-education sector.”

It even put extra language in its contract giving the association the right to reject displays that were “prejudicial or defamatory to the image and/or reputation of Apscu and/or its members.”

The contract also stipulated: “Exhibitors who use costumed persons or mannequins should be sure that their manner of appearance and dress are such as not to offend even the most critical.”

There was at least one costumed attendee, courtesy of a vendor called the Tribeca Marketing Group. Despite being located in Florida, it was apparently trying to play on the theme of its New York City name with a person dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Hey, at least that’s patriotic.

Although overall attendance at the convention this year was down from the previous year, both in college representatives (about 1,000 this year versus 1,600 last year) and among exhibitors (800 to 900 this year versus 1,000 last year), the roster of attendees included some notable guests. Among them was Lois C. Greisman, a top official in the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

The FTC, partly at the behest of several U.S. senators, is now “actively engaged” in monitoring marketing practices by for-profit colleges, Ms. Greisman said. She spoke at a panel, attended by 50-plus people, on the rising level of scrutiny of how third-party marketing companies hired by for-profit colleges are conducting their recruiting.

Later she toured the exhibit hall, paying particular attention to those marketing companies, as well as vendors who sell services designed to screen out marketers who fail to comply with the rules.

Any increase in compliance, she asked one of the latter?

“We’ve seen a lot of people talking about it,” he replied.

In its weekly credit outlook, the credit-rating agency Moody’s Investors Service cautioned on Thursday that more shutdowns could follow.

“The pending closure is credit negative for a small subset of the higher-education sector with similar attributes to Saint Paul’s and other closed colleges: very small, private colleges with a high reliance on student charges, indistinct market positions, and limited donor support,” Moody’s analysts said. “We anticipate more closures for these types of colleges given the current pressures on all higher-education revenue sources and increased accreditation scrutiny.”

Saint Paul’s lost its accreditation last year and then regained it on a probationary basis. But last fall the college was down to just 111 students, according to Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.

A 2012 analysis of nearly 1,700 public and private nonprofit colleges by the consulting firm Bain & Company found that a third of the institutions had been on an “unsustainable financial path” and that an additional 28 percent were “at risk of slipping into an unsustainable condition.”

Nonetheless, closures of traditional four-year colleges remain rare, Moody’s said, with just three in the 2012 fiscal year. But the agency noted a troubling rise in such incidents over the past four years.

Moody’s reports are available to its subscribers only.

Last week at the Summer Seminar, a higher-education conference organized in Minneapolis by the admissions and marketing consultants Hardwick-Day and the Lawlor Group, a Moody’s analyst commented on predictions about impending college closures and a “bubble” in the higher-education market.

“We don’t believe that there is a bubble,” said Eva Bogaty, a member of the Moody’s higher-education and not-for-profit team. The higher-education sector went through the “baby bust” two decades ago, and a number of pundits predicted then that scores of colleges would go out of business. In the end, just one-half of 1 percent did.

Ms. Bogaty ascribed that fact to a fundamental demand for higher education, as college degrees are still connected to stronger earnings and better job prospects.

She noted, however, that the news media have focused on rising costs among colleges and debt among students—usually in articles that are far out of proportion with reality—and that predictions of the vulnerability of colleges are coming back.

“We are not saying that colleges are going out of business like gangbusters,” she said. But the environment has changed, with limited prospects for tuition-revenue growth, strained nontuition-revenue sources, rising debt burdens among students, and a longstanding decline in the buying power of Americans.

In 2007, Moody’s issued 29 ratings upgrades in the sector; in 2012, it issued only two. Ms. Bogaty showed a graph that charted a steep decline in private colleges’ operating revenues against fairly steady spending by the colleges.

“It is really interesting that in 2010—the worst of it for universities—less than 30 percent of private universities cut expenses,” she said. “I’m interested to know if we looked at corporate, what would that be? It wouldn’t be less than 30 percent.”

She argued that colleges needed to find more efficiencies, and that some should consider mergers and sharing services. “That is going to be a wave of the future,” she said.

She also mentioned faculty members. “The elephant in the room is obviously faculty and the shared-governance structure,” Ms. Bogaty said. “How do you deal with that? There is no way that you can operate in the environment that we are in without a major shift in that shared governance.”

Scott Carlson contributed to this article.

That’s the focus of the UNCF’s latest advertising campaign, which was unveiled on Friday at the U.S. Department of Education’s headquarters here and will soon roll out nationwide, as the group tries to tailor its classic brand to attract younger, wealthier donors at a time of lagging college-attainment numbers for minority students.

The UNCF, one of the 150 largest philanthropies in the country, now has slightly longer take on its well-known slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” The updated version: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but a wonderful thing to invest in.”

The new campaign’s message is straightforward. Public-service announcements unveiled on Friday feature stories of real students who speak about their college aspirations. “My name is Sidney, and I am your dividend,” one young woman says, holding up a stock-market ticker that reads “social change.”

Michael L. Lomax, president and chief executive of the UNCF, said the group wanted to underline the concept that giving for scholarships is an investment, not just a donation.

“We have to cut through a lot of clutter. This is a little edgy, a little provocative, and hopefully it will get a lot of attention,” Mr. Lomax said in an interview. “We think it’s smart, and the right way to talk about things. We think it’s contemporary.”

And the UNCF, which pulls in $150-million to $160-million a year in donations, aims to expand its 300,000-donor base to hand out more scholarships and grants to minority students, especially as college costs rise and many historically black colleges and universities face financial struggles.

Though the percentage of Americans with college credentials has inched up over all lately, according to a recent report from the Lumina Foundation, the proportion of younger African-Americans and Hispanics who have earned degrees is smaller than the share of the population at large that has done so.

At the UNCF event on Friday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stressed that the country had to “double down” on increasing access to higher education for minority students and fostering their completion of college as well, not sit back.

“There’s a sense of hope, a sense of movement. But you step back and measure, and you see how far we still have to go. Dropout rates are still unacceptably high,” he said. “If you think we’re anywhere near where we need to be, that’s an absolute fallacy.”

The UNCF is going to great lengths to show donors that their contributions have serious returns. In the four years the organization spent developing the campaign, alongside the advertising agency Y&R and the nonprofit Advertising Council, economists developed formulas to show donors how money spent on students leads to lower crime rates and improved public health.

Their study showed that $10 invested in education for African-American students today will produce $102 worth of benefits for society. Other statistics tout that a $5,000 UNCF scholarship increases a student’s likelihood of graduating by nearly nine percentage points.

“Donors want to know they’re making a difference,” Heidi Arthur, senior vice president of the Advertising Council, said in an interview.

But at the heart of the campaign are stories. Jarrett L. Carter Sr., executive director of the Center for HBCU Media Advocacy, said the stories could help draw in a wider swath of donors. The UNCF, Mr. Carter said, is “really starting to make a push toward telling more stories, telling the stories of institutions and students, even in the face of limited funding and public support.”

About half of the total was raised during the campaign’s initial “quiet” phase, according to a news release from the university. It is the largest such campaign in its history.

The total is substantial given Rice’s relatively small enrollment (about 5,800 students over all). “We have a pretty small alumni group,” acknowledged James W. Crownover, chair of the university’s Board of Regents. He credited two fellow board members, Robert B. Tudor III and Susanne M. Glasscock, with helping spearhead efforts to raise funds, and he added that board members themselves had accounted for more than $200-million of the campaign total, though no single gift exceeded “about $30-million.”

The campaign was also notable in that several of the larger gifts were pledged toward support of the humanities rather than scientific research or a professional school. For example, it was announced last month that Milton and Laurie Boniuk had given the university $28.5-million to establish the Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance, which will bear their names.

Mr. Crownover said that, unlike many campaigns in which big gifts are tied to donor wishes rather than institutional needs, much of the money raised for the Centennial Campaign “went to real programs and real brick and mortar. It really went to university priorities.”

The campaign’s total take may rise further before it ends officially, on June 30.

The statewide Board of Regents voted last summer to begin phasing out a set-aside program that used tuition revenue to support need-based financial aid. Under the bill, the universities overseen by the regents—Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Northern Iowa—would use money from their general funds instead to pay for the aid.

While the universities would still be allowed to use nonresident tuition for financial aid, the bill would be a “credit negative,” according to a report from Moody’s Investors Service, the credit-rating agency.

The bill also includes a 2.6-percent increase in state appropriations to help provide more student financial aid and would require a freeze on in-state tuition at all three universities for the 2013-14 academic year. Nonresident tuition would be increased as much as 2.6 percent at the institutions.

Despite getting more money from the state, the measure could have a negative effect on the institutions’ fiscal health because it “restricts their use of competitive pricing tactics used by nearly all” universities in the United States, the Moody’s report says.

In addition to the appropriations increase, the University of Northern Iowa would get $10-million from the state for financial aid. The bill is expected to have the greatest impact on Northern Iowa because it has the highest percentage of in-state students and the least philanthropic support of the three universities, according to Moody’s.

Moody’s cites the measure as “further evidence of increasing governmental scrutiny and regulation of higher education in the U.S., driven by growing public backlash against rising tuition rates.”

The Moody’s report is available to subscribers on its Web site.

We want to know “what the thirst of private equity is” because its investments fuel the new companies that are playing a role in reshaping the academic landscape, says Mitch Leventhal, vice chancellor for global affairs at SUNY. “Why are we ignoring this phenomenon?”

In their first report on their new blog, Private Equity for Education, Mr. Leventhal and his co-author, Ina Tang, describe and categorize the investment interests of the 266 private-equity firms they identified that had publicly said they invested in education. Of the more than 500 companies receiving investments from those firms, 36 percent were institutions or schools, 24 percent were involved in educational technology, and 19 percent provided services

Mr. Leventhal, who also oversees SUNY’s Levin Institute in  Manhattan, an organization focused on improving New York State’s response to global competitiveness, says the more universities understand about private equity, the more they might be able “to signal” the field about areas where additional investment might be useful.

And if the project happens to send some signals about the institute itself, all the better. Says Mr. Leventhal: “We want to become the place entrepreneurship, institutions, and equity come together.”

In a statement released by Governor Cuomo’s office, Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of SUNY, said, “The governor has said many times that SUNY is the economic engine for New York, and these new tax-free zones will further our campuses’ ability to innovate, create jobs, and attract new companies through public-private partnerships.”

Under the plan, the companies would pay no sales, property, or business taxes for a decade, and employees would pay no income taxes. The venture seeks to replicate the economic success of SUNY’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, which Mr. Cuomo said had attracted billions of dollars of investment to Albany, N.Y.

The tax-free areas would include all SUNY campuses outside of New York City and north of Westchester County, and up to 200,000 square feet adjoining the campuses, three million square feet for designated private colleges, and 20 state-owned properties.

In making the announcement at the soon-to-be-completed NanoFabX building on the Albany campus, Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, was joined Sen. Dean G. Skelos, the Senate Republican Conference leader; Sen. Jeffrey A. Klein, the Independent Democratic Conference leader; and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the Albany Times-Union reported. A press aide to Mr. Cuomo cautioned that the presence of the lawmakers did not mean they were endorsing the plan, although all three men spoke favorably of the prospect of more jobs for New Yorkers.

Richard Overmoyer is executive director of the University Economic Development Association, a national group that encourages university-based economic development. As a past deputy secretary for technology innovation at the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, Mr. Overmoyer helped create the Keystone Innovation Zone Tax-Credit Program, which assists start-up companies in the state.

He cautioned that the broadness of Mr. Cuomo’s proposal, as presented, raised many questions about its viability.

“The challenge is how you draw those maps,” Mr. Overmoyer said. In Pennsylvania, “we purposely did it in a way that limited that geographic range to no more than four square miles around the campus.”

“Some of the SUNY campuses are in rural settings,” he said. “Do you really want to encourage development on greenfield sites? That’s not going to help you.”

A bill containing the details of Governor Cuomo’s tax proposal will be introduced during the current legislative session, which is scheduled to end on June 21. Many details remain to be worked out, the governor’s office said.

The institute was founded in 2009 with a previous $125-million gift from the Swiss-born medical-equipment mogul, who earned an M.B.A. from the university in 1965. The initial gift was reportedly the largest individual donation that Harvard had yet received. In 2004, Mr. Wyss gave $25-million to Harvard’s business school for its graduate program.

The Wyss Institute specializes in research that applies technological solutions to medical- and biological-research challenges—for example, developing a microchip that mimics human lung tissue for experimental purposes. Mr. Wyss’s new gift will go toward continued support and expansion of the institute.

In making the announcement, the university’s president, Teresa A. Sullivan, called the Campaign for the University of Virginia “the most ambitious capital campaign in the history of public higher education.” The campaign was begun in 2004 by a former UVa president, John T. Casteen III.

The university was able to use its “‘public ivy’ status” as a fund-raising tool, Robert D. Sweeney, senior vice president for university advancement, said in an e-mail. “We dared to aspire to be included with the best of the privates.”

He also credited an “extraordinary volunteer leadership who not only gave gifts and made calls but challenged staff and university leadership to really push,” as well as a “a fundamentally sound fund-raising apparatus,” for UVa’s success.

Meeting such a campaign goal is a “highly significant achievement,” especially for a public institution, said Rae Goldsmith, vice president for advancement resources at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. UVa joins “a very small universe” of institutions that have successfully attempted campaigns of $3-billion or larger, according Ms. Goldsmith, and most such institutions are private.

After an initial two-year quiet phase, the campaign was announced publicly in 2006. It received gifts from more than 220,000 donors. The money will be used to support more than 1,000 endowments (including 514 endowed scholarships and 63 endowed professorships), as well as construction and renovation of numerous buildings on the campus.

The governance reforms were a response to some of the problems that may have exacerbated the scandal sparked by Jerry Sandusky, the former football coach convicted last year of more than 40 counts of sexual abuse against young boys.

Among the board’s changes, adopted on May 3, were making the state’s governor and the university’s president two out of six ex officio board members who may not vote; increasing the number of trustees required for a quorum; imposing term limits on all but the ex officio members; and “enhancing” the board’s conflict-of-interest policy.

The changes not only will help prevent future problems stemming from a lack of board oversight, but will be viewed as a “credit positive” for the university, according to the report issued last Wednesday by the credit-rating agency. Moody’s had downgraded Penn State’s credit rating in October 2012, citing the possibility of numerous lawsuits from Mr. Sandusky’s victims.

The agency is not upgrading its rating of Penn State, but in the report, which is available only to Moody’s subscribers, it says the “significant changes” in Penn State’s governance structure and oversight practices “are a credit positive because they strengthen the oversight and management of the university, allowing emerging risks to be appropriately assessed and not overlooked.”