Campus Bookstores Go Private

Next Saturday morning, Cal State Dominguez Hills plans a sale to end all sales at its campus bookstore.

On that day, the entire inventory of books and other wares will be sold to United College Bookstores, a company based in Framingham, Mass., that is taking over management of the store.

Dominguez Hills thus joins a growing list of campuses--including Purdue, Northwestern and Rutgers--that in recent years have gladly surrendered their merchant role to the private sector. In addition to unloading the headaches of managing a retail business, the universities reap a number of other benefits, ranging from improved service for students and faculty to the freeing up of capital that would otherwise be tied up in inventory.

“Trying to provide service and maintain a profitable operation is a balancing act,” said Dennis Fusi, director of Cal State Dominguez Hills’ university foundation, which now operates the campus bookstore. About nine months ago, the school started looking at alternatives because “we did not feel that we were getting the appropriate return in managing the store ourselves,” Fusi said. United College Bookstores, which was bought in 1983 by Follett Corp., the nation’s largest educational bookseller, was chosen from several companies that submitted proposals.

United College Bookstores has been managing campus bookstores, mostly in the Northeast and West Coast, since 1964. It and another division, Follett College Stores, which concentrates on universities in the Midwest and South, operate half of the 500 or so bookstores nationwide that are run by contract management firms, according to Carl S. Rosendorf, executive vice president of United College Bookstores.

“This is still a fairly new concept in the minds of many campus administrators,” Rosendorf said. “But over the last five or six years the concept has been spreading.”

United College Bookstores opened its first store in California in 1978 and now operates 12 campus bookstores in the Los Angeles area, including those at Pepperdine, Loyola Marymount and California Lutheran. Dominguez Hills, with about 7,400 students, is the first campus of the Cal State public system to convert.

The idea appears to offer benefits to all concerned. In addition to recapturing the capital that would otherwise be tied up in inventory, universities receive a guaranteed income in the form of rent paid by the contract management firm.

For students and faculty, United College Bookstores offers a computerized system that enables the staff to locate a book at another location and have it transferred, usually within a day or two. In addition, the company has committed $100,000 for remodeling.

“The typical college bookstore of the 1980s is a department store, with anything and everything a student would need,” Rosendorf said. Gone are the bare-bones operations of the past. Now, students can buy everything from required textbooks to greeting cards, T-shirts, gifts, snacks, records and beauty aids. United College Bookstores also gets into the spirit of campus activities, sponsoring athletic teams and autograph-signing sessions by visiting authors, Rosendorf said. At California Lutheran in Thousand Oaks, where the Dallas Cowboys football team trains during the summer, the store has a wide variety of clothing and souvenirs with the team’s logo.

With a total of 3,000 college and university bookstores nationwide, Rosendorf sees large growth potential. United College Bookstores’ closest competitor is Barnes & Noble, which operates primarily in the Northeast but has a smattering of stores in the Midwest and Nevada. Most other competitors operate only on a regional basis, he said.

“Contracting out to professionals is a thing that is coming,” Fusi of Dominguez Hills said. “Many times it’s best to let the professionals do what they’re trained to do and let us do what we’re trained to do--that is, run a university.”