Buying Smarter
09/01/2005 - Government Procurement (cir. 20,000)

Virtual Addiction
08/29/2005 - Chronicle of Higher Education (cir. 87,246)

As smoking drops, does obesity rise?
08/28/2005 - Orlando Sentinel (cir. 248,492)

Text vs. Text vs. Text
08/27/2005 - Inside Higher Ed (cir. 2,000)

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Buying Smarter
09/01/2005 - Government Procurement (cir. 20,000)

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Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges (LVAIC) incorporated in 1969 as a group of six independent Pennsylvania higher-education institutions whose mission was to expand educational opportunities for students, provide professional development for faculty and staff, and engender greater economy and efficiency of operation among its member institutions.


Today the 501c3 nonprofit consortium, and its purchasing entity LVAIC Business Services, wields an estimated $900 million economic impact on the Lehigh Valley region and the local communities it serves, according to the Human Capital Research Corp. LVAIC’s budget is funded by the member colleges, governmental and private sector grants, and student fees for certain programs. Assessments are partially prorated according to enrollments.


LVAIC Business Services is a model of procurement efficiency with more than $50 million in joint purchasing of products and services and over 100 purchasing contracts and service agreements covering the original six member colleges, seven associate member colleges, their private and public partners, and their suppliers and vendors. Its successful collaborative purchasing programs generate substantial cost avoidance savings for the participating schools, enabling even the smaller members to realize better pricing through group buying power than they would be able to achieve on their own.

Begin Small


LVAIC’s success came slowly. According to William J. Marushak, Director of Business Services, the legal entity was in place before group purchasing began. “Purchasing evolved from [academic collaboration], and it was a slow, painful process,” he says.


At its incorporation in 1969, the Pennsylvania consortium’s primary focus was academic collaboration among the six founding institutions: Cedar Crest College and Muhlenberg College in Allentown, DeSales University in Center Valley, Lafayette College in Easton, and Lehigh University and Moravian College in Bethlehem. The schools’ visionary purchasing directors realized early on that they could pool resources and streamline procurement processes by identifying their common vendors, common suppliers, and common products, bid out the shared commodities, and get a better price for all the members.


Elizabeth M. Lees, Purchasing Director of Muhlenberg College, relates that in the 1970s the informal, member-managed group tried to bid out No. 2 fuel oil and absorbent products. When the bid results were reviewed and the group was ready to make the award, one purchasing director decided not to change vendors after all. The other purchasing directors realized that they would need full commitment among the consortium members and trust to accept the changes in vendors and products that would have to be made in order for the entire group to get better pricing on these commodities.


The consortium reached a turning point in the early 1980s, says Lees, when athletic trainers brought a list of training supplies, such as tape, ice packs, and more, to the LVAIC purchasing directors to put out for bids. “When the bids came back,” she says, “there were significant savings, even though these were the same vendors they had used in the past. All the schools were able to take advantage of it.”


The bid with training supplies encouraged renewed interest in bidding absorbent products, now called coarse paper products, as well as other services such as vending, typewriter repair, and vehicle rentals. Lehigh had a vending contract and asked the purchasing directors to make it available to the LVAIC consortium, which in turn asked the vendors to make the contracts available to the entire group.


Buoyed by its successes, LVAIC approached several community colleges to join the consortium as associate members. Lees remembers that she was at Lehigh Carbon Community College when her CFO received the invitation. Already familiar with LVAIC through her association with the National Association of Educational Buyers (NAEB), she was ready to jump on board.


Adding the community colleges brought increased buying power to the group, says Lees. In turn, there were more contracts with significantly more work for the purchasing directors. “It got to the point where it was hard for them to do the purchasing duties for the consortium plus their jobs at their own institutions,” she says.


In 1996, the purchasing directors asked LVAIC for clerical support, someone to put the RFPs together and review the bids. LVAIC hired a part-time clerical person to handle the growing administrative tasking.

Stay Focused


Marushak points out that the purchasing consortium operated without a dedicated LVAIC representative for 30 years. During this time, he says, “Each [college’s] purchasing director was on his own. The CFOs helped, but the purchasing director was the one who put it together, above what he or she did at the home institutions.” Despite its informal structure, the purchasing consortium managed to reach $2 million in buying power by 1996.


As the portfolio of collaboration continued to grow, LVAIC’s Board of Directors, comprised of the presidents of the member schools plus LVAIC’s Executive Director, who serves as the consortium’s CEO, acted upon a recommendation by a consulting firm and hired Marushak as the full-time Director of Business Services, with responsibilities for growing the consortium’s group purchasing. When Marushak joined LVAIC in 1999, the consortium’s portfolio totaled $10 million in group purchasing. Five years later it had grown to over $50 million.


“We grew,” he says, “by having a dedicated person in the LVAIC office managing over 50 groups, including facilities, athletics, information directors, purchasing directors, campus police chiefs, any operational components of the institutions we’re meeting with now. It’s pretty extensive.”


Before Marushak was hired, says Lees, when the purchasing directors were on their own, they would try to bring together everyone involved in the bidding. Some would come, many would not show. It was difficult to get their cooperation. “Once [Marushak] was hired and everyone knew the decision came down from all the presidents of the institutions,” she says, “he went out and started meeting with the IT directors, the plant operations directors, asking what their needs were. He’d bring the list back to us and then we could act on it, but we always kept the communications open through [Marushak] with those departments.” The constant dialog, she says, actually helped purchasing to negotiate more successful contracts.

Create Partnerships


When Patricia L. Reich, Director of Purchasing at Lehigh University, came to Lehigh three years ago from the private sector, she saw that the critical mass LVAIC had achieved early on bred successes that in turn encouraged new collaborations with the purchasing directors to make other bids start to happen. “It was a labor of love in the beginning,” she says. Adding the full-time manager position enabled the purchasing consortium to make a quantum leap. “Support from the top helped [LVAIC] ramp up to where it is now,” she says.


“From where I sit as the Director of Business Services,” says Marushak, “the top-down support is extremely important, but for my success it’s the bottom up and lateral. If I can’t build consensus of support at the bottom and mid levels, this organization would not be successful in group purchasing and business services. There’s no way we would have grown from $10 million to over $50 million if we didn’t have the support of the major stakeholders who are asked to buy off our contracts, who are asked to be a part of what we’re doing.”


Marushak emphasizes that the smaller institutions, by working with schools such as Lehigh, now can buy through the group and afford higher quality products and services than what they could afford on their own. Equally important, he says, is that LVAIC receives a high level of support from its vendors. “We pride ourselves on building partnerships with vendors,” he says. “You don’t get that [support] if you don’t have the credibility and the buying power. We do have their attention. When you’re spending over $3 million a year in office supplies, that’s significant.”

Look Past Price


Reich points out that LVAIC seeks to buy quality and includes value-added programs that encourage members to buy into the purchasing agreements. “We try to emphasize to the other stakeholders that we’re not out there to buy the cheapest stuff. We look at other things as well: Is it good service, is it good support, is it a good warranty?” She gives the example of Lehigh’s computer agreements that include extended warranties and in-house, manufacturer-trained tech support.


Nor is anyone forced to participate in bidded contracts, says Reich. “People aren’t forced into doing something that would make them uncomfortable and break that trust, that camaraderie. We go out for bid. We let them know up front. If six of 12 say they are going to participate, then they participate and [the others] are not forced.”


For entities such as municipalities thinking about starting their own purchasing consortiums, says Reich, including value-added programs that are important to their members will help them get more members to buy in to their purchasing agreements.


Lees recalls that a municipal group approached LVAIC about instituting a purchasing program of their own. They came to meetings to see what the consortium was doing. It was evident they had the same problems as LVAIC early on. One township would participate, one township used only this vendor, and no one wanted to trust the others. Lees says the lesson here is to get everyone who uses the products and services talking together.

Define Programs


Marushak defines the steps followed by LVAIC Business Services in the formal bidding program. His Project Recommendation Report is an extensive but user-friendly due-diligence model that covers the project from initiation to follow-up evaluation:


Statement of Improvement Opportunity: Identifies the pursuit of a particular project, vendor, commodity, or service.


Available Alternatives: Helps schools identify and decide if the program is appropriate for them.


Conclusions and Recommendations: Gets down to the decision process based on financial and other benefits of the project.


Implementation Schedule and Matrix and Implementation Team Matrix: Drill down to which departments need to be consulted on the decision to move on to the project.


Six-Month and Twelve-Month Diagnostic Reports: Create a follow-up program after the project is implemented leading to renewal, termination, rebid, or reevaluation of a contract for services.


Marushak says that the stakeholders decide if after the evaluation a contract needs to be extended or rebid. “I’m the one who will put the RFP together,” he says, “but it’s really a decision of the stakeholders.” They discuss these issues at every group meeting and make decisions as a group. If the contract is to be rebid, he puts together the conditions and specs and submits the proposal to the purchasing directors for final approval and endorsement.

Stand Together


Conflicts can arise when vendors try to circumvent the system. Citing her tenure at the community college, Lees recalls that the community colleges added their own regulations to state policies covering advertised public bids. When a vendor contacted her and tried to get information on her first coarse-paper bid, using the tactic that community colleges had to release that information, she politely advised the vendor that his request did not fall under the regulations and she did not have to release the information he wanted.


Lees advises purchasing personnel in municipalities to heed the example and educate their departments about ethical purchases. To some, she says, “their idea of a good purchase is just to look for the cheapest price.”


LVAIC, likewise, has been challenged, says Lees. “[Marushak] has to tell [the vendors] that these are the rules and this is the way [LVAIC does it]. This isn’t just the purchasing director telling you this.”


Marushak adds that now everyone is aware of expectations, and if they have questions they know to call the purchasing directors. “There have been times,” he says, “when if a community college wasn’t sure of the practices they had to adhere to, they would not participate. Now they are astute about what they can and cannot do within the context of their policies and procedures.”


The schools can choose to opt out of participating in a project based on internal pressures and expectations or from a community college perspective that it may not meet the litmus test of what they have to follow.


Incorporating performance bonds into bid specifications also can help circumvent conflicts with suppliers.


Marushak cites price increases this year for coarse paper, oil, and resin-based products. LVAIC was able to bypass the price increases because of its relationships with suppliers and how it wrote the bid specs.


“No. 2 fuel oil prices started to go through the roof,” Lees relates, “and vendors who had the contracts said they could not honor the contract prices any more and were going to charge another price instead. People involved in these contracts have to realize they have to stand firm and tell vendors ‘you signed this contract,’ and hold them accountable for it.”


LVAIC refused to pay the increased price and went with the next company that had participated in the contract. “That person to this day still has the contract,” Lees says.


She cites another situation with coarse paper for the schools when substitutions were made and the products did not fit. “The next time [LVAIC] wrote the bid specs, [we said] that there were to be no substitutions. We also wrote in—and here’s the value-added that we look for as a group—that if they sent a substitution without prior permission we would have the right to send things back at their cost and the right to go to someone else for the products.”


By taking this unified stand to protect the schools, Lees says, LVAIC seeks to eliminate problems from suppliers who might look for other ways to circumvent the bid specifications and keep their profit margins intact.


Marushak meets with suppliers, account reps, and executives on a quarterly basis to make sure they cover these issues and to share with them the concerns of the entire LVAIC membership. “We believe in being as proactive as possible to decrease the amount of problems that may occur,” he says.

Centralize Purchasing


Marushak encourages centralized purchasing. “All our schools do have at least one purchasing professional in place,” he says. However, many municipalities may not. He suggests the model in which a dedicated person at each municipality would be assigned to a certain project. By starting small with these
liaisons and building upon their individual successes, the entities eventually will be able to validate the creation of a centralized position.


Marushak outlines the procurement process as beginning with his monthly call for proposals from the member schools. The purchasing directors can present their ideas to LVAIC to see what the consortium can do as a group.


For example, Moravian needed to dispose of old computer monitors that contained mercury and hazardous waste. Marushak presented a computer scrap-recycling program to the purchasing directors, then to the IT directors. He suggested due diligence to identify the departments that would be impacted and to see if there was a need for computer recycling. Next he interviewed several organizations to see who could meet the group’s needs. He drew up terms and conditions of the agreement and presented it to the purchasing directors. They reviewed it, and at this point they could seek legal counsel for even further review and endorsement. LVAIC finalized the contract, signed off on it, and the members started purchasing the service. As a result, LVAIC selected a local company, a decision that aligned with the consortium’s mission to promote business in the Lehigh Valley. That relationship has been so successful that LVAIC is presenting it to a state consortium.


LVAIC also has benefited from an examination of hazardous waste disposal. In this case Lehigh approached its staff in health and safety to assemble a list of suppliers that met the requirements. Responses were analyzed by Lehigh’s certified safety professionals and recommendations whom to select and why were made to the group. Everyone was able to comment on the specs and add what they needed or wanted before the bids went out.


Several schools chose not to participate, but those who did benefited because they could take advantage of Lehigh’s staff expertise and also receive better pricing. Lehigh, the largest of the institutions, benefited from even lower pricing due to the larger volume of participating users. And the vendor benefited from the additional number of local schools participating that in turn generated a more efficient pickup run for the hazardous waste material.


“This is a good example of sharing resources among the institutions,” Marushak explains. “The largest receives better pricing than it would get on its own and the smaller and midsized institutions receive price benefits and the valued expertise of the Lehigh staff.”


“The vendor consolidates his runs and pickups and passes those savings on to us through a price decrease,” he says. “This encapsulates and summarizes everything we do.”


Marushak admits that LVAIC is successful due to the close geographic connection of its member schools, but he believes that because of the way LVAIC has built its culture the members could be miles from one another. “It’s the system we operate under that makes us successful,” he says.


From a vendor perspective, having the group within a 26-mile radius puts LVAIC in a position to maximize savings. “But you can have municipalities right next to each other who don’t even talk.” he says. “We have competition [between] Lehigh and Lafayette, the oldest football rivalry still played, and here they are at the same table buying office supplies together.”


“This isn’t specific with just our consortium,” adds Lees. “The [rival] mentality has to be let go. By working together, everyone benefits. If you keep a vendor to yourself so that you’ll have an edge on me, then you’re not doing the job that you should be doing for your college or municipality, or whatever.”

Study Successes


Municipalities can look to the LVAIC consortium as an example of responsible purchasing. “As a taxpayer,” says Reich, “people look for what their folks are doing to contain costs and at the same time keep services up.”


LVAIC’s savings are clearly documented, Lees explains. “[Muhlenberg’s] president can show [parents] that through the local purchasing consortium we have saved X amount of dollars. As a taxpayer, I would like to know that the person at my municipality buying rock salt or whatever was participating in some sort of joint purchasing organization so that I know my tax money is being used wisely.”


Marushak says that it’s easy to overlook the amount of intellectual capital in LVAIC’s 50 groups. “If you look just at the purchasing directors, we rely on these experts to lead the discussion. That’s the magic that makes us tick. We are able to leave our egos at the door and rely on one another to help us do what’s best for the group, which goes back to our institutions and our students.”


In summarizing LVAIC’s success, Marushak says, “I want to emphasize that no matter what school we work for, no matter how big or how small our schools are, the bottom line is that we’re here to serve our students and to serve the heritage and history of our institutions—past, present, and future. That’s what holds us together.”


The same approach can be applied to municipalities, he says. “They are there to serve their constituents as best as they possibly can, to preserve the history, the present, and the future. Regardless of how close or how far you are from one another, if you can keep that as the basis for your working together, and keep that in mind, I think the opportunities for collaboration are endless.”



Editor’s Note: William J. Marushak (left) has served as the Director of Business Services for the Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges (LVAIC) in Bethlehem, PA, since 1999.
Patricia L. Reich, C.P.M., A.P.P. (center), is the Director of Purchasing at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, and an active member of the LVAIC consortium. Elizabeth M. Lees (below, left) has served as Director of Purchasing at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA, for eight years and previously as Director of Purchasing, Lehigh Carbon Community College. For information about LVAIC, visit www.govinfo.bz/5195-201, or send correspondence or questions via
e-mail to: marushakw@lvaic.org; par2@lehigh.edu; or lees@muhlenberg.edu.


Questions to Ask When Exploring Collaborative Opportunities

* What does it mean to collaborate?
* What are the rules of engagement?
* What is the level of commitment? How much information can/should I share?
* How do I know that I can trust my colleagues?
* Do I have support from the administration to make decisions that impact my group/department?
* How do we measure member loyalty?
* How much additional time and resources need to be allocated to the group?
* Who is going to organize meetings and execute action items?
* How are decisions going to be made?
* What/who is the governing body?
* My institution is small in comparison to others. Does this mean we have less influence on decisions?
* How much is this going to cost?
* Can we do better as a standalone institution?
* We compete for the same resources. How can we possibly collaborate with our competitors?
* What can be done to promote collaboration among competitors?
* We belong to other associations. Why would we want to join/start another one?
* How will the group ensure participation in collaborative projects?
* Does my entity need to participate in all projects undertaken?
* How will the group deal with noncompliance issues?
* Is the mission of the group in alignment with my entity’s mission and value system?


Keys to Successful Business Services Collaboration

1. Endorsement and support from major stakeholders
2. Incorporation of a system that identifies group collaboration opportunities
3. Prioritization of collaborative projects
4. Setting clear, concise, and attainable goals
5. Establish policies, procedures, and expectations for group engagement
6. Understand the culture of each member institution and representative department
7. Centralized vs decentralized purchasing
8. Quantify the “hard” and “soft” cost avoidance savings for each project

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Virtual Addiction
08/29/2005 - Chronicle of Higher Education (cir. 87,246)

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When students lose themselves in online worlds, it can be hard to bring them back to reality By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL Nothing could beat the high Matthew Small felt when he earned a new suit of armor. As a sophomore last spring at Saint Anselm College, in New Hampshire, Mr.

Small would gloat about the armor, the swords, and all the other make-believe gear he collected during his daily six-hour stints playing World of Warcraft, an online video game. Most of his friends did not share his enthusiasm. 'They would tell me to shut up,' says Mr. Small. 'They told me the game was completely stupid, and would say, Look what you're wasting your time on.' For seven months, he ignored their warnings. Instead of worrying about whether the real Mr.

Small could maintain his 4.0 grade-point average, he became fixated on what his virtual character, known as a warrior-healer, could accomplish in an imaginary world called Azeroth. Mr. Small says he recalls writing papers that were so bad that he should have been embarrassed to hand them in.

His grades slid and close friends drifted away. Then one day in mid-July, Mr. Small discovered that he had logged 1,008 hours -- 42 days -- playing the game since January. He had what addicts call a 'moment of clarity,' and he decided to hang up his armor for good.

The warrior-healer fought his last battle nearly two months ago. Many other students, however, are not reining in their Internet habits. Role-playing games like World of Warcraft, and other computer-based entertainment, like online gambling, instant messaging, and blogging, are safer than some recreational activities that are popular on college campuses, such as drinking.

Yet for some students, computers are as addictive as alcohol. Some campus officials say an increasing number of students have unhealthy obsessions with the Internet's endless diversions, causing them to struggle academically and withdraw socially. While some health experts say that it is impossible to become addicted to the Internet, most agree that students' nonstop access to the Web makes it particularly challenging for them to avoid spending too much time online. They also concede excessive computer use can harm students, and statistics back those experts up.

The American College Health Association's 2004 National College Health Assessment, a survey of 47,000 students, found that 13 percent said their recreational computer use had significantly hindered their performance in courses. (Fifteen percent said depression had hurt their grades, and 8 percent said alcohol had done so.) Some smaller surveys also suggest a correlation between excessive computer use and low grades. At the State University of New York at Stony Brook last year, Peter Mastroianni, the college's health-education coordinator, found that one-third of 116 students who had a grade-point average below 2.0 listed their computer habit as the top reason for their struggles. Nearly half said it had at least some impact on their grades.

Maressa Hecht Orzack, a psychiatrist and founder of the Computer Addiction Service at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Mass., says she frequently receives e-mail messages and telephone calls from concerned parents 'They say, Help me, my child has flunked out of college. He's so bright but he spent all his time on the computer.' Getting Pulled In Despite growing awareness of the problem, so-called computer addicts are hard to identify and easy to ignore. Mr. Mastroianni, who hosted the American College Health Association's first seminar on computer addiction at its annual conference in June, says many college officials do not believe that their students can become completely immersed in online activities.

Some colleges also say excessive Internet use affects only a handful of their students. Student-support administrators at the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology tell The Chronicle that their students are too smart and too motivated to develop digital dependencies. For most students, logging on to the Internet seems as natural as brushing their teeth.

Many assume that everyone else is wasting just as much time on their computers, and are often surprised when their online habits hurt their grades and friendships. 'They don't see it as a problem until it crosses the boundary of them failing out of school,' says Kimberly Young, a management-science professor at St. Bonaventure University who lectures at colleges about Internet addiction. There is no easy way for administrators to distinguish between students who have no trouble logging off and those who do. Few health problems arise from overusing the Internet.

Many overusers spend late nights on their computers, but most of their peers are sleep-deprived, too. Other common symptoms, like carpal-tunnel syndrome or eye strain, are just as likely to be caused by moderate computer usage. It is also difficult to predict which students are most likely to retreat into their own little online world. 'Anybody can get pulled too far into it because it's not something they ever think they have to be careful about,' says Mr.

Mastroianni. 'They know about the risks of drugs and sex, but who ever thinks they have to approach a computer carefully? Their guards are down.' Gambling and online-game sites attract many more men than women, but female students are just as inclined as males to while away their hours sending instant messages, shopping online, or blogging. Students with many friends are just as likely as their antisocial counterparts to get hooked on online pastimes. Students who spend many hours online are typically goal-oriented, says Nick Yee, a graduate student at Stanford University who recently completed a survey of 35,000 online gamers. He found that students became hooked on the games' elaborate challenges.

Many were high-achieving students -- not slackers. Beyond Help? The only way to identify the students with potentially harmful use patterns is to do what Mr. Mastroianni did at Stony Brook Ask failing students specific questions about their computer habits.

Some other institutions are also doing just that. Two years ago Susan L. Lantz, associate dean of students for academic support at Lehigh University, began asking struggling students about the hours they spent online. More than half of them, she found, said their Internet habits had caused their grades to dip.

But helping students recognize their problem is easier than finding a solution. Ms. Lantz tried to help one student whose 3.6 grade-point average had fallen to 0.5 one semester, and to 0.2 the next.

Although the student responded promptly to her e-mail messages, he did not come to Ms. Lantz's office until she dispatched a resident-life staff member to confront him. She met with the student and referred him to counseling, but he eventually failed out of Lehigh. 'The problem with very bright individuals is they think they can turn it around themselves,' says Ms. Lantz. 'They don't think of it as a problem that they need help with.' Mr.

Mastroianni had a similar experience when he urged the failing students at Stony Brook to attend a seminar on online addiction he had designed specifically for them. Not one student showed up. He plans to make his next workshop mandatory.

Ultimately, colleges cannot keep a student off the Internet unless he or she is doing something illegal, like hacking into private databases. Ms. Lantz had to explain that to the exasperated mother of a Lehigh student, who asked why someone at the college could not turn off her son's computer at intervals to limit how much time he spent gambling online. 'Students have to be on the computer to function,' says Ms. Lantz. 'It's how they communicate with professors and get information.' Some colleges are trying to drag students away from their monitors and into the social life of their dorms.

At the University of Utah, resident assistants like Joel Arvizo bring paint and rocks into the dorm so students can design their own doorstops -- and use them to open up their rooms to passers-by. Mr. Arvizo also encourages students to hook up their Sony PlayStation video-game consoles in common areas.

That way, he says, students might talk to each other while playing. Mr. Small, the Saint Anselm student, gave up his online fixation without help from officials at the college. But he would like to see more resources, like support groups, for students who are struggling to wean themselves off the Internet. 'I think it would be easier for people to get out of it if they knew there were other kids on campus trying to do the same thing,' says Mr.

Small. The former online-game junkie has deleted World of Warcraft from his computer and has packed the software away in a box. Recently, one of Mr.

Small's best friends on the campus also quit playing the game, which has helped him resist the temptation to log on again. Still, sometimes he thinks about the adventures he might have had and the dungeons he could have explored. 'I kinda hope I can stay away from it,' says Mr. Small. 'I don't want to get sucked in again.'

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As smoking drops, does obesity rise?
08/28/2005 - Orlando Sentinel (cir. 248,492)

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The percentage of Americans older than 20 who are regarded as obese has more than doubled, to about 30 percent, from about 14 percent in the early 1970s. And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says obesity was responsible for 112,000 premature deaths in 2002, and for $75 billion in medical costs in 2003.

But as the United States lost the battle against the bulge, it waged a more successful campaign against another menace to public health smoking. Because of an aggressive public-information campaign, new restrictive laws, and huge increases in federal and state taxes, the percentage of the population that smoked fell to 22.5 percent in 2002 from 37 percent in 1970. Strange as it may sound at first, many economists and health-care experts say they think the two trends may be related. Experts blame factors ranging from urban sprawl to junk-food-laden diets for the increase in the number of Americans who are obese -- defined as having a body-mass index higher than 30.

But smoking, or the decline of smoking, may also play a role. Nicotine is a stimulant, which means that smokers burn calories faster. And it's an appetite suppressant, which means that smokers eat less.

Consider French Women Don't Get Fat, a best-selling book. Some critics said that the real reason chic Parisian women stayed trim while gorging themselves on croissants was that they smoked more than their American counterparts. Indeed, conventional wisdom, soundly rooted in the personal experience of millions of former smokers and in several studies, has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking. But economists are increasingly applying their tools to measure the way monetary incentives, or disincentives, affect all sorts of human behavior -- and hence the ability of government policy to alter it.

And they've been wondering whether high cigarette taxes, which are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, may have the unintended effect of redirecting them from one form of unhealthy behavior to another. According to William Orzechowski and Rob Walker, two economic consultants based in Arlington, Va., the price of a pack of cigarettes rose to $3.37 a pack in 2001 from 63 cents in 1980, thanks in large measure to various state and federal tax increases. (Adjusted for inflation, that's a 164 percent gain.) And many smokers responded the way any economically rational consumer would, despite the fact that many felt as if they were addicted They stopped using the product as it became more expensive. Broadly speaking, said Michael Grossman, an economics professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes leads to a 5 percent reduction in cigarette consumption.

But the fear of gaining weight as a result of quitting may have discouraged some smokers from stopping -- and apparently with good reason. In a 2004 study, Grossman, along with Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University and Inas Rashad of Georgia State, mined state-by-state behavioral surveys from 1984 to 1999 to get to the root causes of rising obesity. Though they found that the prevalence of fast-food restaurants was responsible for most of the climb, they concluded that the decline in smoking accounted for about 20 percent of it. Overall, they found that 'each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal.' Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't think the relationship between lower smoking and higher obesity rates was so direct.

Though people may gain weight when they quit smoking, they tend to shed those pounds later. 'There's no evidence in the medical literature that quitting smoking will affect your weight over a long period of time,' he said. And by themselves, the short-term weight gains associated with smoking shouldn't be enough to push masses of former smokers into obesity.

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Text vs. Text vs. Text
08/27/2005 - Inside Higher Ed (cir. 2,000)

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Aug. 26 Text vs. Text vs. Text Two economics heavyweights are introducing new textbooks into the intro-to-econ fray.

Related stories Pecking Order, Aug. 5 Not So Dismal Enrollments, July 18 Cheating Scandal at Virginia, June 30 Living on the Edge, April 14 Economists and You, Jan. 10 E-mail Print Paul Krugman, a Princeton University economics professor and New York Times columnist, and Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia University business school, hope the market will be kind to their books, both of which are getting their first real use in this new academic year. The introductory economics textbook business can be a lucrative one. Principles of Economics, by N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor, brought an advance of $1.4 million in 1997, and has since become common shelf material in college bookstores.

Several other intro texts have made professors rich. The new books, for which only microeconomics portions have been unveiled so far, are from authors on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Krugman is famous for his anti-Bush tirades in The New York Times, while Hubbard was on the Bush administration's Council of Economic Advisers, helping to engineer tax cuts.

For the most part, though, the content of their books may not be startlingly different from each other, or from the books already out there. It's like adding Pepsi to the shelf with Coca-Cola. You have more choices. You might have Shasta and Canada Dry, too, but it's mostly more of the same, said Fred Gottheil, an economics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who teaches intro courses and is the author of his own textbook, Principles of Economics.

The book publishers, however, beg to differ. They say the books are unique, from each other and from other texts on the market. Each chapter is going to follow a real case of a real business, said David Hakensen, a spokesman for Prentice Hall, which published Microeconomics, which Hubbard wrote with Anthony P.

O'Brien, an economics professor at Lehigh University. Krugman's book, Economics, which he wrote with his wife, Robin Wells, also a Princeton professor, takes a story-driven approach that focuses on real-world economics at work, according to the Worth Publishers Web site. Both books will sell in the range of $100, give or take $20 depending on the markup. Hakensen noted that a digital, SafariX version of Hubbard's text is available.

What about the Krugman competitor? With Aplia, students can use the digital book and professors can give homework online, said Craig Bleyer, publisher for economics at Worth Publishers. Some professors don't think the digital options really break new ground. I'm on the bloody Internet, on your screen answering questions, Gottheil said of an option to which book owners can log in for help via video.

What's Krugman going to do new, tell jokes? Unless he comes on 3-D. Then, OK, he beat me. In fact, Krugman did show up in person to the University of Pittsburgh last year, where Shirley Cassing, an economics professor, was promised a visit if she tried using his book during testing last year. It was so cool.

He's not very dynamic or flamboyant in person, she said, but the sheer force of his ideas made it engaging. Cassing is a fan of Krugman's book. We're all familiar with his writing, she added.

Even if you don't share his views, the writing in the book is still really good, and there's no obvious bias. Cassing said the Aplia option allowed her to assign homework that is done online and graded automatically to her 200 students. She credits that for part of improved student performance over the past, when she used Mankiw's book and homework was essentially optional because all 200 problem sets could not be graded. Other professors, however, are reticent to use either of the new books, fearing political perspectives may be injected. [Hubbard and Krugman] both have dogs in the fight, said Allen Sanderson, an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

Sanderson said he winced in a couple places where he detected some bias in Krugman's book. Paul doesn't use minimum wage as one of the traditional examples of restrictions. He would have a hard time doing that and coming back and arguing for higher wages for the unskilled.

Sanderson said that the major topics of microeconomics are pretty well agreed upon, and that you probably can't go too wrong with many textbooks. In this case, though, he said he found Hubbard's real-world examples to be well-written, and engaging. Still, though Hubbard has a shorter paper trail than Krugman, Sanderson is not sure he can be objective enough. One thing is for sure not everyone is as enthralled with all of Krugman's writing as Cassing. [Krugman] writes great economics, Sanderson said, but when he writes politics he's just bad.

Other professors felt it was a fantasy to search for a textbook author with no bias. All authors have views and values, said Richard Easterlin, an economics professor at the University of Southern California. It's better to have them out there explicitly than cloaked in the guise of objectivity.

Chuen-mei Fan, an economics professor at Colorado State University, has used some of the traditional texts in the past, and said she found that Krugman's examples were more alive to students. For example, a chapter on long-term economic growth opens by talking about 1900 House, a BBC documentary where a modern middle-class family lives as if it was a middle class family in 1900. The example is used to discuss changes in living standards over time. While Krugman is the columnist, it's Hubbard who uses the newspaper in the textbook arena.

Chapters in his book include newspaper articles showing how the financial press covered decisions made by real businesses. Some professors predict that public relations, not content, will determine the success of the two new texts. Gottheil recalled when Mankiw's book came out.

A PR firm was hired, and the big advance generated buzz. No one had a PR firm before that, said Gottheil, who gives his book royalties to a cancer-fighting fund in memory of his son. Gottheil thinks there are a lot of quality texts out there, but that any claims of reaching students on a new level might be exaggerated. Look at the preface of any book 'I wrote this to get to students.

I'm not interested in royalties,' Yeah sure. Everyone says that, including myself. Added Sanderson As economists, we tend to think the market works.

This is probably true with textbooks. David Epstein Comments Facts? What Facts? Lets all hope Krugmans textbook editors have been more exacting about facts and substance than his editors at the New York Times. I do have to tip my hat to Krugman, however, for sensing (probably correctly), that his celebrity status as a two-bit polemicist (apart from the notoriety he deserves as a former advisor to Enron) would win him an adoring following from campus folk who would reward him by forcing their students to pay hyper-inflated prices for the textbook. If able to be candid, I wonder if any of his textbook editors will end up agreeing with former Times public editor Daniel Okrent, who opined, I can't come up with an adverb sufficient to encompass [Krugmans] general attitude toward substantive criticism.

Stu Gittelman, at 8 32 am EDT on August 26, 2005 $$ & textbooks I read that textbooks represent 16% the cost of undergrad education now. My sons roomie, a biz major, is paying over $700 this semester for texts. Hell recover a small portion of that.

My son is taking a course w/ a $120 text, authored by the prof teaching the course. Are we supposed to be getting rich off our students in that way? I think some universities have restrictions on assigning your own text, although I really dont know. Ive stopped using texts entirely. I use a mix of trade books and on-line materials.

There is so much information available like reports etc that is public access. I cant stand the idea of requiring these grossly over-priced texts. I certainly dont have any interest in making other profs wealthy (or having them visit my class @ stars).

The whole situation verges on scandalous venality run amuck. Mike Sacken, prof of educ at tcu, at 10 49 am EDT on August 26, 2005 Krugman has had a international economics textbook with a price above a hundred bucks circulating for over a decade. If hes capitalizing on his celebrity now, hes also capitalizing on his demonstrated ability to write textbooks that are well regarded in his field. Thane Doss, Tokyo Thane Doss, at 11 16 am EDT on August 26, 2005 Textbook prices are nuts! IMHO, both authors are going to face serious competition from existing texts.

Its like trying to enter the McDonalds/BK/Wendys universe lots of luck, youll need it, guys. As to professors who assign their own textbooks some schools do try to prevent that. Theres a potentially-related legal term for such faculty self-dealing.

The feds usually take a dim view of self-dealing outside academia. But, of course, academia is above such minor matters of law, basic fairness, and common sense. And for more on textbooks .. http //www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/16/textbooks B.S.S., at 11 34 am EDT on August 26, 2005 Facts? What Facts?Let's all hope Krugman's textbook editors have been more exacting about facts and substance than his editors at the New York Times. Prof.

Sacken, you could provide at least a few examples of alleged Krugmans factual misbehaviors, if one is to take your claims seriously and start a debate. Or does your rhetorical skills amount to just wordy salvos and smears?