When it comes to saving money on textbooks, students can help themselves by renting their books or buying them used. Professors can help students by only upgrading to new editions when they have to. Federal regulators can help both groups make well-informed choices by requiring textbook publishers to give their customers the information they need to be frugal. But what can the colleges themselves do?

Daytona State College thinks it has the answer: eliminate the used-book and rental markets on campus and have all students buy e-books.

By doing so, the college could save its students as much as 80 percent on course materials, says Rand S. Spiwak, its chief financial officer.

» via Inside Higher Ed

E-textbooks are not forever. Most publishers make their academic titles available for only a semester, or a year, after which time, the digital files self-destruct.

Now the University of Michigan Press is trying an even shorter rental period for its e-books. Customers have the option of renting 261 of the press’s most popular scholarly texts for either 40 percent or 75 percent of list price, for a rental period of either 30 days or 180 days. Essentially Michigan is combining two emerging trends in the textbook industry: rentals and e-books.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Hardest hit will be small, private colleges in the upper Midwest and on the East and West coasts. New York’s Utica College, for instance, is planning on a 7 percent decrease in enrollment over the next five years. Larger universities are not immune either. As Marc Harding, director of admission at Iowa State, puts it: “Any university interested in growing—or even stabilizing—its enrollment in the next few years will have to reach out to a more ethnically diverse population.”

» via The Daily Beast

But the largest problem with all these college rankings and guides is this: A student’s success or failure in college and in life will ultimately be determined by who they are, not which college they attend. Successful people attended all kinds of colleges - only three CEOs of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies attended “elite” colleges, and 12 of the top 20 attended public colleges.

» via The Consumerist

Mark James, a visiting lecturer at the University of West Florida, declared his summer course in English literature technology-free—he skipped the PowerPoint slides and YouTube videos he usually shows, and he asked students to silence their cellphones and close their laptops.

Banishing the gear improved the course, he argues. “The students seemed more involved in the discussion than when I allowed them to go online,” he told me as the summer term wound down. “They were more attentive, and we were able to go into a little more depth.”

Mr. James is not antitechnology—he said he had some success in his composition courses using an online system that’s sold with textbooks. But he is frustrated by professors and administrators who believe that injecting the latest technology into the classroom naturally improves teaching.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)