From the issue dated September 3, 1999

Colleges Get Free Web Pages, but With a Catch: Advertising Companies offer sites with on-line schedules and e-mail to send marketing pitches to students By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK First it was the stadium scoreboard. ALSO SEE: 'Portal' Companies Compete for Colleges' Business and Students' Eyes Then the campus dining hall. Now, thanks to the hype over the commercial potential of the Internet, even registrars are getting corporate sponsors. Striving to streamline student services and improve electronic communication, colleges across the country are signing on with companies that offer sophisticated World-Wide Web sites through which students can register and pay for courses, check their schedules and class assignments, and receive campus announcements keyed to their specific academic and extracurricular interests. In most cases, the companies are offering these all-encompassing "portal" sites to colleges free of charge. The catch? To varying degrees, the sites also feature advertising messages and e-commerce offers from companies ever eager for entree into the 14-million-strong college-student market. Students who respond to the companies' requests for additional information about their hobbies and habits, or who simply use the campus-approved sites as a jumping-off point to other points of interest on the Internet, may find themselves viewing pages laden with advertisements pegged to their interests or previous purchases. Most of the companies deploy on-line "cookie" software to track users' Web-surfing activities. The companies use some of that information, in turn, to court additional advertisers and direct their messages to students who are judged most interested in seeing them. If a male student looks at basketball sites, for instance, "we'll know he may be interested in seeing an ad from Nike on men's basketball shoes," says Bill Townsend, vice-president of corporate branding for YouthStream Media, owner of MyBytes.com, a portal company that unveiled its new service in August. For some observers, both inside and outside of academe, the arrangements signal an alarming trend. "The university is sort of betraying the trust of the student," says Andrew Hagelshaw, senior program director at the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, in Oakland, Cal. The center deals mostly with corporate intrusion into elementary and secondary schools, but is also beginning to take an interest in commercial ties to higher education. Even if the sites give students the option of not filling out detailed profiles -- as most sites apparently do -- "this is still clearly a case of setting up a captive audience," Mr. Hagelshaw says. "It's a sign of the spread of marketplace values to all sorts of institutions," adds Harry C. Boyte, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota. Society, he says, still needs public places -- village greens, public libraries, and college campuses -- "that aren't commercialized." Mr. Boyte, whose center focuses on the public mission of higher education, says that the trend -- like the "erosion of the public purposes of scholarship" -- reflects a weakening of leadership at colleges. "Higher education is one of the few institutions that can resist the trend toward a simply commercialized world" -- if its leaders want to, he says. "Administrators and presidents have a choice," he says. Creeping commercialism and student privacy aren't the only concerns. With college-oriented portal companies sprouting left and right, college leaders are besieged with offers. They are struggling to sort out how the sites would actually use the student information that is collected; whether the services meet the institution's needs; and, in some instances, whether the companies' claims about other academic affiliations are overstated. The Harvard Business School, for example, has asked two of the companies -- Jenzabar and MascotNetwork -- to remove references in their promotional material suggesting that Harvard employees had a role in creating the companies' technologies. Some other companies have claimed colleges as customers even though the institutions say they've agreed only to test the services. So eager are the companies for inroads that some of them are sidestepping central administrations on campuses and courting individual schools or departments, such as the financial-aid office or the business school. MyBytes, for one, is pursuing such a strategy. What's more, the MyBytes format allows individual students or organizations on a given campus to establish their own presence on MyBytes. For some colleges and universities, that could prove confusing. Appalachian State University officials, for instance, selected a company called Campus Pipeline to create the institution's main portal. But MyBytes is also marketing its services to students at the university, offering them e-mail and Web pages on the MyBytes portal. Students can't get access to their grades or schedules through MyBytes, but can join chat groups and get movie reviews. (MyBytes says that it doesn't include such home-grown pages when assembling its official list of clients, but that it does count institutions where it has some formal arrangement with an office or department.) Though the college-portal "industry" is just beginning to flower, a few companies have already taken root by using their higher-education connections. MyBytes, based in Cambridge, Mass., is a subsidiary of YouthStream Media Networks, a company heretofore known for marketing to school and college audiences through campus movies and posters. Campus Pipeline, of Salt Lake City, has marketing and financial backing from SCT, a major supplier of administrative-computing software for colleges. The connection has paid off: The service claims more than 400 colleges as formal customers, the most of any portal company. Campus Pipeline is designed to work with colleges' SCT student-information systems, providing students with a Web-page format through which they can register for classes. If they are wait-listed for a particular course and a space opens up, they can be automatically notified. They can also send and read e-mail through the portal, and receive notices about club meetings or fellowship-application deadlines in their field. "We're partners with the schools," says Chad Muir, one of Campus Pipeline's three chief executive officers. "We're not just turning something on and hoping everyone will come visit it." Officials of several other companies say their portals, too, are designed to be integrated with campus computer systems, although the degree of personalization varies. Campus Pipeline is also unusual for the way it is marketing itself. The company has established an enrollment-based licensing fee -- which runs as high as $800,000 for a large university -- but it waives the fee if the institution agrees to accept advertisements on the site. The company says this approach is designed as a money-saving benefit to colleges. But since no other company appears to be charging such a fee, it is difficult to say how much of a bargain Campus Pipeline customers get by accepting the company's plan. Another company, Jenzabar, plays up the past celebrity of its founder, Chai Ling. A leader of the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, she escaped Chinese authorities and went on to become a business consultant and to receive an M.B.A. from Harvard. Company press releases, which invariably note that Ms. Chai was "twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize," breathlessly describe Jenzabar as a tool to "create another kind of revolution," fueled by communications technology. Web-site companies that focus on college audiences aren't new. Student-oriented sites like Student.com have been around for several years, and a number of companies now specialize in creating sites for college athletics programs and alumni-affairs offices. What is new is the growing presence of companies that provide an electronic framework for fundamental academic and administrative services, such as students' e-mail and course assignments. New, as well, is the phenomenon of colleges' agreeing to put these fundamental services within a commercial environment. "This upcoming school year is going to show how schools are turning the corner," says Joshua M. Block, director of campus operations for MyBytes. Colleges, he says, will have to decide "whether or not they want to let valuable services pass them by just because they come with advertising." At several colleges that have already taken the leap, officials say they are satisfied that the tradeoff is worthwhile. Several take comfort in the companies' assurances that student information won't be used for commercial purposes, or that the ads won't be obtrusive. But in some cases, it appears that companies and colleges don't always share the same understanding of what "student information" is protected, or of how the companies can use the data they gather from the registration forms they ask students to fill out, or from tracking students' Web-surfing habits. Officials of Arizona State University's College of Business learned that lesson a few weeks ago, after probing into the terms of their arrangement with MascotNetwork, a portal company in Cambridge. James H. Finger, the college's director of information-technology services, says he had initially understood that the company wouldn't be making any commercial use of student information. But after rereading the contract and talking to the company, he found that MascotNetwork had agreed that while it would not provide advertisers with information linked to students' names, it could track a student's Web habits and then use the information to attract advertisers and to aim ads at the students accordingly. Jason Palmer, MascotNetwork's chief executive officer, says it would use the tracking information "to provide a compelling experience" for students. That experience does not yet involve aiming advertisements or e-commerce offers at students, largely because his start-up company does not have the personnel to manage such an operation. "But I would love to offer that in the future," he says. Mr. Finger, who says he chose MascotNetwork because it seemed less commercial than some of the other companies did, says such a shift in its focus might prompt him to reconsider his arrangement. He is unsure what would constitute too much commercialism, but "I know it when I see it," he says. Tracking has also prompted some concern at the University of Oregon, which is testing Campus Pipeline. "People's hackles went up" when they realized that the system used cookies to track user's Internet activities, says Susan M. Hilton, assistant director of Oregon's computing center. The presence of ads themselves, or "sponsorships," as Campus Pipeline calls them, were less of an issue, she says. "Older people found the sponsorships more offensive than the students did." Campus Pipeline's Mr. Muir says that the company would direct ads and e-commerce offers only if the students had authorized such activity, and that even then, the messages wouldn't be individualized. "Even with permission, we're not going to take it down to one person," he says. Advertisers are less interested in that kind of marketing, he says, than in "reaching the general college demographic." Campus Pipeline acknowledges that it will monitor the activities of students who have elected not to receive marketing materials -- but Mr. Muir says the information will be used only to improve the overall quality of the site. Colleges using the portal companies say they are mindful of privacy concerns. "We're going to make it real clear -- it's voluntary," says Jeff T. Williams, director of information-technology services at Appalachian State, one of the first universities to use Campus Pipeline. Appalachian, he says, would have preferred to acquire the services without a commercial component. But the price that the company wanted was too high. "If it were $20,000, we'd forget about it and pay it," he says. But with 12,300 students, Appalachian would pay $204,000 under Campus Pipeline's current license-fee schedule. So the university opted for the "sponsorship" plan. As a result, students will see ads whenever they register for class, send e-mail, or check their schedule. Mr. Williams notes that students see ads all the time on the Internet. "Well, we're exposing them to a few more." Two weeks into the fall semester, the issue of commercial intrusion into academe has prompted more discussion than controversy among Appalachian students, according to Sam Searcy, a senior who is the student-body president. "The Internet is all about advertising anyway," he says. "A lot of students that I've talked to don't care," and they appreciate the ease of checking their e-mail and course Web pages from a single site, he says. The experience of some institutions with non-commercial portal services, however, suggests that students appreciate sites on which they don't have to see advertising. "We get a lot of student feedback," says Eric J. Splaver, a computing administrator at the University of California at Los Angeles and a creator of its portal for students, MyUCLA. "Students seem to really appreciate not having to look at ads." But the issue isn't black and white, he notes. If MyUCLA were to run ads for a company that offered CD's to students for lower prices than are available locally, he wonders, "am I doing them a service or am I doing them a disservice?" For many institutions, the concern about ads is outweighed by a desire to provide a robust electronic environment. Most institutions, lacking the money or the expertise of a U.C.L.A., can't create such sites themselves. Dakota Wesleyan University is one such institution, says its president, John Ewing. "Our faculty are at the beginning stages of using the Web," he says. He hopes that Jenzabar's easy-to-use templates will encourage more professors to create Web pages for their courses. Besides, he adds, many South Dakota high schools don't have extensive technology themselves, and many of the college's 700 students arrive with little computer expertise. "We're just trying to find ways to entice students to become more technologically literate." "We certainly don't want to sell our soul to advertisers," he says, but he is willing to see how the arrangement with Jenzabar works out. Robert J. Wickenheiser, president of St. Bonaventure University, expresses even fewer concerns. When the institution signed up with MyBytes, he knew that students would see a lot of ads as a result. But having spent time on line recently while recuperating from leg surgery, he says the commercial presence doesn't alarm him. "It is amazing how many ads appear and you sort of block them out." Mr. Wickenheiser also recognizes that the portal is likely to carry advertisements from companies like VarsityBooks.com, which competes with campus bookstores. "I'm a great believer in competition," he says. If a competitor is offering better prices, "our store should look at why it's being undercut." Of course, to attract advertising, the portal companies will have to prove to retailers that students are, in fact, using their sites. As with many other Internet start-ups, most of the companies are hoping to develop enough cachet to make a splash on Wall Street. (The parent of MyBytes, YouthStream, is already publicly traded.) With publicity and a sense of momentum crucial to the companies' success with investors and advertisers alike, they are focusing mightily on marketing. And that does give pause to some colleges. Bernard Gleason, associate vice-president for information technology at Boston College, says he is irked that both Jenzabar and MascotNetwork have claimed ties to his institution, and that Jenzabar appears to be taking credit for technological innovations at the college, in which it played no role. "If they're this out of control in their marketing," he says, he can't help wondering how well they police matters such as their privacy policy. Mr. Gleason says he's not opposed to the companies' business models per se, but he believes that his college, as well as others, need to be sure that they really understand these new relationships. A portal company may run ads for a telephone company that pays it the highest advertising fees, but that company may not be the one with the best long-distance rates, he notes. "Our students expect us to protect them." If a college is going to get into the middle of those situations, he says, "it's important for the institutional management to understand what this means." http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Page: A45 Easy-to-print version E-mail this article