U.S. colleges leap ahead with marketing savvy

Ace! NewsFlash

Colleges Market Easy, No-Fee Sell to Applicants

RICHMOND, Va. — Over the last few years, the tiny College of Saint Rose in Albany has seen applications increase at least 25 percent annually, minority admissions rise and its standing in the U.S. News and World Report rankings climb more than 20 rungs.

Colleges are using direct mail to increase applicant pools.

Its secret? Lifting a page from the marketing playbook of credit card companies. Last fall the college sent out 30,000 bright red “Exclusive Scholar Applications” to high school seniors that promised to waive the $40 application fee, invited them to skip the dreaded essay and assured a decision in three weeks. Because the application arrived with the students’ names and other information already filled in, applying required little more than a signature.

More than 100 other colleges and universities paid the same marketing company to send out variations of these fast-track applications last fall, more than a five-fold jump since 2006. Some have spent upward of $1 million on their application campaigns, and many have seen their applicant pools double or even triple in the last two years.

Theirs is a roster that includes well-known institutions like Marquette (which promised a free baseball cap to the first 250 respondents to its “Advantage Application”); Rensselaer Polytechnic (the “Candidate’s Choice Application”) and the University of Minnesota (“the Golden Gopher Fast Application”). Others that have regional reputations — like the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. (the “Distinctive Candidate Application”) — are hoping to raise their national profiles.

While some guidance counselors say they welcome the elimination of application fees — which can be as much as $50 per college — they worry that the express applications may be short-circuiting a storied process in which students search out the colleges that might be the best fit for them. The counselors also fear that recipients of the applications are being lulled into thinking they have been pre-approved for admittance. In fact, Marquette, with a freshman class of about 1,950, sent out about 40,000 of its “Advantage” applications last year, and will reject about 40 percent of its applicants over all. Asked about the proliferation of such mailings, Robert Bardwell, a college counselor at Monson High School in western Massachusetts, said: “It’s disheartening that schools have to resort to this. I think they’re dealing with teenagers who don’t know what they want. I worry that they are applying just because it’s free, rather than that they think this might be the school for them.”

It is no coincidence that these marketing campaigns are similar to those in the financial and political worlds. Royall & Company, which designed and sent out most of these application packets from its offices in Richmond, employs several veterans from the direct mail campaigns of long-distance phone providers and banks. And its founder, Bill Royall, is a former political strategist who played a lead role in a mailing sent to tens of thousands of donors to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, hours after he accepted the Democratic Party nomination in July 1992.

The rise in short-cut applications appears to have two main causes. One is the fractured economy, which has left some colleges scrambling just to fill their freshman classes and to identify applicants who can pay full tuition. But there is also U.S. News and World Report, which puts a premium on big jumps in applications, as well as in applicants’ standardized test scores, in assembling its annual rankings.

Royall helps each college identify potential applicants by buying lists of high school students’ names and addresses from the College Board, based on how they performed on the PSAT or SAT, or on information they provided on their high school class rank, interests or ethnicity. To Royall and its clients, the subsequent outreach helps students who might not know that a particular college exists. Moreover, the company argues that it is saving applicants precious time at a hectic moment in their lives. (Some colleges’ fast-track applications, for example, encourage students to submit a graded high school paper in lieu of an original essay.)

“People might say this is too easy, it isn’t rigorous enough,” Mr. Royall said. “No one has ever told us that the people applying using these methods are less qualified.” Mr. Royall said that no college had ever mentioned climbing the U.S. News rankings as a goal. Instead, he said, most engaged his firm because they hoped to increase the quality and diversity of their applicant pools. And the strategy appears to work.

Eduardo Garnica, 19, of Sacramento, said he had expected to attend the University of California, Davis, until he received a “Distinctive Candidate” application from the University of the Pacific, 50 miles away in Stockton. “I hadn’t been that interested in going there,” he said. “But they made it easy.” Mr. Garnica said he had been captivated immediately by the words “Waived application fee” and “No required essay!” on the bright orange envelope. Inside, a cover letter congratulated him for having “earned an opportunity that is reserved for only a select few high-priority students.” (In truth, he was one of 30,000 who got the letter.) He said he was flattered enough to visit, liked what he saw and was later accepted. He enrolled as a freshman this past fall. Mr. Garnica said he was enjoying the university so much that he was willing to forgive a white lie in its marketing campaign — there is no application fee for anyone applying to Pacific, and thus no fee to waive.

Similarly, Matthew Buck, a 17-year-old high school senior at Monson High School in Massachusetts, whose counselor is Mr. Bardwell, said he had applied this year to York College in Pennsylvania, Wells College in New York, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, largely because they sent him fast-track applications. “It was free,” Mr. Buck said. “I had nothing to lose.” He added, “If they’re willing to consider me, then I’ll definitely consider them.”

Mary Grondahl, vice president of enrollment management at the College of Saint Rose, said she started working with Royall several years ago at least partly to broaden the college’s reach beyond the state’s capitol region and to encourage more young men to apply. Last year, it paid Royall about $120,000, or $4 per application. The college credits the company, in large part, for helping increase the percentage of men in last year’s entering freshman class to 35 percent, from 28 percent less than a decade ago. Meanwhile, the number of enrolled students who hailed from outside the Albany region has increased to 63 percent, a 10-percentage-point gain from just a few years earlier, while the percentage of students who identified themselves as African-American, Asian or Hispanic, rose to 18 percent, from 7 percent, Ms. Grondahl said. Over all, applications climbed to more than 4,000 for the class of about 600 that enrolled in September.

Asked to fix a value on the campaign, Ms. Grondahl said, “It was almost like the MasterCard ad says: priceless.”

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, IELTS etc ***

Book now for 2014 at El Bulli?

Ace! NewsFlash

'World's best restaurant' El Bulli to shut

El Bulli, the Spanish restaurant repeatedly crowned the world's best, will be temporarily closed in 2012 and 2013, its chef Ferran Adria said Tuesday, citing fatigue and a need to perfect new recipes.

Spanish chef Ferran Adria tells reporters in Madrid that his restaurant, El Bulli, which has repeatedly been crowned the world's best restaurant, will temporarily close in 2012 and 2013 so that he can take a "sabbatical."

"No meals will be served in El Bulli in 2012 and 2013," said the guru of avant-garde cuisine and creator of "molecular gastronomy". "But El Bulli is not closing down. These are not two years on sabbatical. I need time to decide how 2014 is going to be. We want the year 2014 to stand out and I know that when I return it will not be the same." A statement on the restaurant's website added that "these two years will be devoted to thinking, planning and preparing the new format for subsequent years."

El Bulli, on Spain's northeastern Catalan coast, last year came top of the World's 50 Best Restaurants list for the fourth year in a row following a poll of more than 800 chefs, restaurant critics and industry insiders for Britain's Restaurant Magazine. Gourmets the world over reserved sometimes years in advance for a table in the establishment, where about 30 avant-garde dishes are available on a menu for a price of about 200 euros.

But Adria, 47, who appeared tired and nervous, said he found working 15 hours a day "difficult." "It's impossible with the current format of El Bulli to continue to create," he said at Madrid Fusion, the annual international culinary conference focusing on the cutting-edge in haute cuisine. "It's like telling (British designer) John Galliano to go work in a factory."

He acknowledged that in closing the restaurant, he would lose his three Michelin stars. "I have a lot of respect for the guidebooks, and when you go, you go."

Adria, who joined the kitchen staff of El Bulli in 1984, and Heston Blumenthal in England have since the late 1990s rocked the world of gastronomy by using science to "deconstruct" and rebuild food, both astonishing diners and delighting reviewers. Taste-bud treats on the El Bulli menu have included oyster meringue, hot ice cream, frothy truffle cappuccino and liquid ravioli, while vegetables are turned into lollipops or whipped foams.

But he has had to respond to critics who say the chemicals used in his "molecular gastronomy" make it unhealthy. "Can we be proud of a cuisine ... created by Ferran Adria and his chorus of fans which fills plates with gelling agents and laboratory emulsifiers?," another top Spanish chef, Santi Santamaria, said in 2008.

Adria dismissed the comments as "nonsense." "Homemade ice-creams, those which are excellent, must have a stabilising substance to avoid crystallisation. Sugar goes through a chemical and physical transformation. Chocolate contains lecithin. Agar is a thick substance that has been used in Japan for centuries," he said.

Before announcing the temporary closure of El Bulli, Adria had put on a presentation of his new dishes at Madrid Fusion, including "hare with red fruit," "cannelloni with mushrooms" and a "strong cocktail" based on sugar cane.

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, IELTS etc ***

Game On, Music On!

Ace! NewsFlash

Why Berklee is teaching its students to compose scores for video games

Nazer Lagrimas, 22, president of Berklee’s Video Game Music Club, is aiming toward a career in interactive audio. The club claims more than 300 members.

“Abandon,’’ a video game designed by a group of MIT students and set in a mysterious, surrealistic world of traffic cones, toasters, bookcases, and other vaguely menacing objects, may never make it to game stores or home consoles. But it will have at least one feature found on most commercially marketed video games: an original soundtrack, professionally composed and painstakingly synched to the game’s play features and story line.

At least that’s the goal of a recent Berklee College of Music class whose subject - composing music for video games - is growing in popularity by leaps, bounds, and beeps. Video games pull in $20 billion a year, roughly the combined revenues of the film and music industries. Berklee, one of a handful of schools prepping students for a field that barely existed 10 years ago, is eager to tap that booming market, one that’s making boldfaced names out of its most talented and prolific composers.

Game on, as they might say around campus.

“The push to teach game audio really came from the students here,’’ says Michael Sweet, a Berklee associate professor whose professional background includes writing music and sound design for nearly 100 video games. A 1990 Berklee graduate and avid gamer who joined the faculty 18 months ago, Sweet lists one of his goals as “build[ing] the John Williams for video games in the next generations.’’ His classes fall under the purview of the school’s Film Scoring Department, whose chairman, Dan Carlin, has strongly supported the initiative. Another key proponent has been assistant vice president for curriculum Jeanine Cowen, who four years ago taught the first Berklee course focused exclusively on game audio.

Back when he was a student, notes Sweet, video games were popular but hardly a career anyone at Berklee thought much about. “Now, it’s a juggernaut,’’ he says. “The quality of the artwork and production values [are] dramatically higher, and so is the orchestral work.’’

Berklee is offering five classes this semester in video game audio or game scoring. Sweet says his typical student is not only knowledgeable about state-of-the-art video games like Modern Warfare and BioShock but also has classroom experience in disciplines like sound production, voice acting, music technology, and film scoring. Versatility and familiarity are important. In writing for games, composers must anticipate and create cues for the various layers and levels a player passes through. Story lines and scenes change rapidly and unpredictably. As technology improves and memory space expands, moreover, these games have grown more sophisticated, visually and sonically. Players’ expectations rise accordingly, creating a demand for such elements as a full orchestral score.

Besides offering classes and a summer program in Music for Video Games, Berklee boasts a large and active Video Game Music Club, which holds weekly meetings and claims more than 300 members; sponsors an annual Video Game Orchestra concert of original game music; and hosts panels led by leading game professionals, some of them Berklee alums. One recent topic of discussion among club members has been an upcoming San Francisco conference, where prospective game professionals can take workshops and network with industry reps. Several club members plan to attend, while even more are considering a career niche that promises to be both creative and lucrative. Composing for video games can command fees ranging from a few hundred dollars per minute of music to a couple of thousand.

Berklee grads who’ve already made their mark in the industry include Norihiko Hibino (Metal Gear Solid, Zone of the Enders) and Olivier Deriviere (Obscure, Alone in the Dark), and Shota Nakama, creator and director of the Video Game Orchestra. Club president Nazer Lagrimas, 22, a film scoring major from San Diego, is aiming toward a career in interactive audio. “To me, the fun of video game music is that it’s not linear, like a movie [score] is,’’ Lagrimas says. “There are no real rules or conventions.’’

Berklee senior Sean Hathaway, 23, of Idaho, has already written music for TV and film. He regards game scoring as his most promising career opportunity, though, given the money and prestige it potentially offers. “It’s a great alternative for young composers who aren’t interested in the extremely crunched deadlines that come with television and film scoring jobs,’’ Hathaway says. Dialogue and sound effects often drown out the music onscreen, he adds. Whereas the TV or movie experience is over in a couple of hours, video games involve dozens of hours of play, sometimes more. “There’s more recognition of the music itself,’’ Hathaway says.

Berklee is not the only school building interactive game audio into its curriculum. Yale Music School, New York University, and the New England Conservatory have also developed classes and programs in the artform, according to Paul Lipson, president of the Game Audio Network Guild, an organization that provides information and resources for professionals in the field. Still, Lipson, an NEC grad, places Berklee in the forefront of the movement. “Major music schools and universities are taking this field very seriously, and Berklee has really been leading the way,’’ he says. The guild has strived to build close ties to the school, he adds, in order to maintain a high degree of professionalism. Music schools like Berklee “are kind of locked behind the cloistered walls of academe,’’ Lipson says. “They need advice on the latest trends, so we’ll bring people in to talk with students and faculty.’’

Berklee has forged additional working relationships with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a hotbed of young game designers, and with the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media Division. While MIT has plenty of capable game designers, “There aren’t as many great musicians around as Berklee has,’’ notes GAMBIT audio director Abe Stein, who commissioned the class work on Abandon. Sweet’s students had to sign a licensing agreement granting MIT rights to their music, providing the game isn’t later sold or licensed for a fee.

They also heard somewhat contradictory messages about approaching Abandon as composers. MIT game designer Matthew Weise urged students to “go as crazy as you want.’’ Sweet put the emphasis on the fundamentals, though. What actions, he asked the class, might trigger a change in tempo? Where might musical flourishes be inserted? Cross-faded or layered? Should the music be cued by the characters encountered in the game or by the achievements realized by the player?

What it boils down to, he said, jotting all their options on a whiteboard, “is how much stuff can you put in the soup?’’

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, IELTS etc ***

Android, Google, smartphones, English!

Ace! NewsFlash

Strapped to Android, HTC Takes a Dizzying Ride to the Top

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC is on a tear. This year alone, the company has released five Android handsets. Its next phone, the HTC Nexus One, aka the Googlephone, is among the most anticipated devices of 2010.

Just about a decade old, HTC looks like it is poised to pull ahead of much older and larger rivals such as Samsung and LG in worldwide phone market share. While the older companies’ strength lies is in now-declining “feature phones,” or inexpensive, less-capable handsets, HTC’s bet on the booming smartphone business is giving it a major boost. It has also acquired a powerful godfather in Google, the Goliath whose attention is now captivated by the mobile phone business and whose chosen partner is HTC. “We have covered a distance in the last three years that many other companies haven’t in ten,” says John Wang, chief marketing officer for HTC.

About one in six smartphones in the United States in 2008 was a HTC phone, according to Neilsen Mobile. And with a slew of new handsets and a clever bet on Android, HTC is now the fourth biggest smartphone maker, after Nokia, Research In Motion and Apple. HTC’s Android portfolio now includes the original G1 and MyTouch on T-Mobile, the Hero on Sprint, and the Tattoo and Droid Eris on Verizon. And while Nokia is struggling to get a grip on the U.S. market, HTC is gaining ground. “HTC got into bed very, very early with Google and that has helped them,” says Avi Greengart, research director for mobile devices at Current Analysis.

HTC has risen to prominence rapidly because it is young, ambitious and unencumbered by the legacy technology and old business that slow down its peers. Founded in 1997, HTC has always focused on designing and manufacturing smartphones — multifunctional devices with powerful processors — rather than inexpensive flip phones. Its first product in 2000 was the the Compaq iPaq, a PDA that ran Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system. PDAs were a hot product then, but HTC CEO Peter Chou realized mobile phones would be a bigger market. Chou started courting telecom operators in Europe with an offer to create customized handsets for them. By 2002, HTC had two phones out, for O2 in the UK and Orange in France. Soon HTC was cranking out handsets for T-Mobile and other European carriers.

Placing the right bets

But it’s Android, the Google-designed open source operating system, that turned HTC from a boutique OEM (original equipment manufacturer, or contract manufacturer) into a mobile powerhouse. Over the last decade, HTC’s CEO Peter Chou has quietly networked to build a fat Rolodex and strong relationships with some of the most powerful names in the industry. Android creator Andy Rubin was one of them. Rubin’s company Danger had created the Sidekick, an extremely popular phone on the T-Mobile network. Chou’s HTC would later produce a similar phone called the MDA for T-Mobile.

In 2003, Rubin founded Android, a stealth startup whose mission was little known beyond the fact that it would create software for mobile phones. But Chou and Rubin were already talking. In 2005, Google acquired Android. As the new operating system began to take shape, HTC seemed like a good partner for the hardware.

HTC at a Glance

Employees: 9,353 (at the end of 2008, up 45.5 percent from previous year)

Headquarters: Taiwan

Founder and chairman: Cher Wang

CEO: Peter Chou

Revenue: $1.05 billion at the end of the third quarter 2009, a 10 percent decline from a year ago. Revenue grew 28.7 percent in 2008 to $4.2 billion.

R&D Expenses: $643 million (2009)

“Google’s OS required a pretty sophisticated handset and HTC knows how to do that,” says a former HTC executive who worked with the company for two years but didn’t want to be identified because he still works in the wireless industry. “HTC is aggressive and they have the speed of development to get a product to market early.”

For HTC it was an interesting opportunity, though not without its risks. “When we started to work with Google, we had no visibility at all,” says Wang. “The (Android) platform probably would not even materialize and even if it did, it could be just another one in the market. But we shared the excitement.”

So for three years before the first Android phone would hit the market, HTC poured engineers and researchers into a project aimed to create a phone that would run a brand-new operating system.

“We made the first Google phone that Google engineers used to develop Android,” says Wang. “We had about 50 HTC people roaming around Google campus then, wearing the Google badge and eating the wonderful Google food. That was how deeply the two companies collaborated.” It also speaks to HTC’s business model, says Greengart. “HTC likes to let someone else build the underpinnings for the phone and for them to work on higher-level stuff,” says Greengart.

Focus on design

Unlike Nokia, HTC has been quick to adapt to fast-changing consumer tastes in mobile phones. When slider phones were all the rage, HTC created the MDA for T-Mobile. Slim phones, touchscreens, Android devices — HTC has them all.

HTC’s ambitious expansion continues. Last year, HTC acquired One & Co., a San Francisco-based industrial design firm that has created products for Nike, Apple and Dell, among others. Over the next three years, it will spend $1 billion to create a new R&D facility near a Taipei suburb. “We are the second or the third best design house in the world when it comes to mobile phones,” says Horace Luke, chief innovation officer at HTC. “The trick of design is it is not just styling but also great engineering.”

HTC has also been quick to understand that when it comes to mobile phones, looks alone don’t cut it. “They have done a lot of innovation on software in terms of the user interface,” says Greengart. “HTC shipped a touch phone with a 3-D cube interface before most other handset makers.”

In June, HTC announced Sense, a UI skin that would sit on top of the Android OS. Sense offers widgets for adding new features, brings together contacts from different sources, and allows users to set different profiles for work and home. “With a lot of smartphones out there you have to go to four different locations — your Gmail, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter — to find what’s up with one person,” says Luke. “But content is content. It doesn’t matter where its comes from.”

Personalization will be another big trend, says Luke. “I firmly believe that the phone you have should never look like the phone I have,” he says.”If you love stocks and financial news that’s what your phone should show. But if I am interested in Hello Kitty and manga then my phone should reflect that.” It’s an idea Palm first offered up with the Pre. But since HTC’s announcement, Sense has become an important feature in new smartphones including Motorola’s Cliq.

Creating a brand

Apple’s iPhone or Research In Motion’s BlackBerry have become cultural icons. But when was the last time you heard someone say they wanted a “HTC phone?” Even when the first Android phone was launched last October, it was called the ‘Googlephone’ or T-Mobile G1; the new Googlephone is called the Nexus One. Most customers forget the HTC brand in that context.

That’s what Wang says he wants to change next. “For many years, HTC has been the company behind the scenes,” he says. “In the earlier days, we did not post our brand on the phones. But three years ago we made a decision within the company to build the HTC brand.”

It’s not just vanity. Smartphones are an intensely competitive market. At the top, Apple and Research In Motion both have strong brand recognition and a growing base of users. In the middle, producers such as Samsung and LG own a huge share of the feature-phone market, but are hungry to sell more smartphones. And at the bottom, contract manufacturers such as Acer and Asus are looking to crawl up the chain. For now, HTC still occupies the lower tiers of brand recognition. A stronger brand would translate to more clout, fatter margins and bigger revenues.

Branding is even more important in the smartphone world, where consumer tastes can shift quickly, crowning new winners and losers every few months. Having a powerful brand can shield a handset maker against some of these shifting winds. “In my time at HTC, they went from $200 million in revenue to $1 billion,” says the former HTC executive. “But you can’t continue that unless you have a brand.”

“It was becoming harder to innovate from one generation to another without a brand,” admits Wang. “If you create a phone that sells well on one carrier it’s not enough. The next version resets everything.” But, so far, HTC has not shown its commitment by allocating a hefty marketing budget for branding, says the former HTC executive.

Throwing money around won’t help, says Wang. “Brand value is like respect, you have to earn it,” he says. “You can’t buy respect. You can spend all the money you want to build the recognition but that doesn’t mean anything. I want the HTC brand to stand for a great experience.”

Creating a global culture

HTC doesn’t want to be just another Taiwanese handset manufacturer. Despite its strong Asian roots, the company has tried to build an international business culture. Almost all of HTC’s senior management is of Asian origin. The company has its headquarters in Taiwan and is listed only on the Taiwanese stock exchange.

Yet the company’s primary language is English. User documentation, technical papers and even all e-mails and staff meetings at HTC’s office in Taiwan are done in English.

“When Peter started at this company, he demanded everyone take an English test before they come in,” says Luke. “He always had a vision that the company would go global.”

Many of HTC’s executives, including company founder Cher Wang, went to graduate school in the United States. But Wang, who belongs to one of Taiwan’s richest families (her father, a plastics tycoon, was named the second-richest man in Taiwan by Forbes magazine last year), rarely grants media interviews.

HTC has also imbibed one of the greatest ideas of American business: It’s okay to fail. HTC’s R&D division called has a “target failure rate” of 95 percent, says Luke. “A research lab has to come up with enough ideas that fail fast and fail early so you can learn and harvest the right ones,” he says. “That’s very different from the culture at Taiwan, where you have to be successful all the time.”

While HTC is unmistakably aligning its future with Android, the company isn’t willing to give up on Windows Mobile — at least publicly. “Our commitment to Windows Mobile platform is unwavering,” says Wang. “Both platforms are important. They match different people.”

For HTC, the last 10 years have been a rocket-like rise. But the battle to stay ahead of the game has just begun.

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, IELTS etc ***

"Whitening Creams" - worth the risk?

Ace! NewsFlash

For years, Allison Ross rubbed in skin-lightening creams with names like Hyprogel and Fair & White. She said she wanted to even out and brighten the tone of her face, neck and hands. Mrs. Ross, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, also said that she used the lightening creams “to be more accepted in society.”

Allison Ross used creams for years to lighten her skin. She developed several severe side effects.

After months of twice-a-day applications, her skin was not only fairer, it had become so thin that a touch would bruise her face. Her capillaries became visible, and she developed stubborn acne. A doctor told her that all three were side effects of prescription-strength steroids in some of the creams, which she had bought over the counter in beauty supply stores. “I never read the labels,” Mrs. Ross said. Instead, she took her cues from friends, many of them, like her, from the West Indies. “Once somebody told me Fair & White was the one they were using, I’d go to the Korean store and ask for it,” she said.

Dermatologists nationwide are seeing women of Hispanic and African descent, among others, with severe side effects like Mrs. Ross’s from the misuse of skin-lightening creams, many with prescription-strength ingredients, which are sold in beauty shops and bodegas and online. Hyprogel, made in Germany, contains the powerful steroid clobetasol propionate and includes a warning to use only as directed by a doctor. Fair & White, from France, normally contains no steroids, but counterfeit versions with undisclosed ingredients have turned up in stores.

No major studies have focused on the use of such creams in this country. But dermatologists with practices that cater to darker-skinned women say adverse effects are on the rise. Ethnic beauty supply stores, where clerks often shrug at selling prescription creams over the counter, report that sales are strong. Dr. Erin Gilbert, a chief resident in dermatology at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, said that she or a colleague saw a case of severe side effects from skin-lightening creams at least once a week. Dr. Gilbert attributed the frequency, which she called surprising, to the fact that the hospital served an “amazingly international cross section of women of color.”

Users are not necessarily immigrants, said Dr. Eliot F. Battle Jr., who has a dermatology practice in Washington, where he treats side effects from lightening creams “not only containing corticosteroids, but mercury,” a poison that can damage the nervous system. The patients are “Ph.D.’s to women from corporate America, teachers to engineers — the entire broad spectrum of women of color,” Dr. Battle said. For years misuse was on the decline, Dr. Battle said, but now “it’s happening more because the Internet has been a great source for these patients to get physician-strength or prescription-strength products.”

Some users are seeking to lighten dark spots caused by acne or brown patches known as melasma, which are triggered by pregnancy, menopause or birth control pills. But many others seek to lighten their entire face or large swatches of their body, a practice common in developing countries as disparate as Senegal, India and the Philippines, where it is promoted as a way to elevate one’s social standing. A small percentage of men in such countries also use the creams.

In November, some fans of Sammy Sosa, the former Chicago Cubs slugger, were surprised when photographs from the Latin Grammy Awards ceremony showed his face as uniformly lighter. Online critics accused him of wanting to be white. Mr. Sosa, a Dominican-born American citizen, told a reporter from ESPNDeportes.com that he had used a cream nightly to “soften” his skin and that it had bleached it, too. “I’m not a racist,” he said in the interview. “I live my life happily.”

Sammy Sosa, the former baseball slugger, in 2007, left, and 2009. He said a cream to “soften” his skin had bleached it, too.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said it was wrong to assume that skin-lightening was a cultural anachronism or an effort to negate one’s racial heritage. “In fact, it’s a growing practice and one that has been stimulated by the companies that produce these products,” she said. “Their advertisements connect happiness and success and romance with being lighter skinned.”

Moreover, it is not as if dark-skinned women are imagining a bias, said Dr. Glenn, who is president of the American Sociological Association. “Sociological studies have shown among African-Americans and also Latinos, there’s a clear connection between skin color and socioeconomic status. It’s not some fantasy. There is prejudice against dark-skinned people, especially women in the so-called marriage market.” There was an echo of the issue recently in comments by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, as reported in a new book, that he had urged Barack Obama to run for president because the country was ready to accept a “light skinned” African-American.

In the aisles of ethnic beauty supply stores on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, dozens of skin lighteners are for sale, most manufactured abroad. Prescription creams with clobetasol propionate were available recently for as little as $3.99. “Clobetasol is the most potent topical steroid we make in dermatology,” said Dr. Gilbert, who works nearby. “There’s almost no indication where you’d use it on the face. And it’s basically provided to people as cosmetic products. It’s illegal.” A salesman at Blessing Beauty Supply, who would give only his first name, Monroe, said the secret to one best-selling cream, L’Abidjanaise, was that “it has steroids in it.” Asked why he sold prescription medications illegally, he declined to answer.

A spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, Rita Chappelle, would not say whether the agency was pursuing such violations. “As a matter of policy, we do not discuss enforcement actions,” Ms. Chappelle wrote in an e-mail message.

Long-term use of a whitening cream with topical steroids can lead to hypertension, elevated blood sugar and suppression of the body’s natural steroids, doctors said. Some side effects, like stretch marks, may be permanent. Some doctors also identified hydroquinone as a culprit in misuse cases. At a strength of 4 percent or higher, it is prescribed for short-term use to lighten skin blemishes like sun spots. Over-the-counter versions like Fair & White contain 1.9 percent hydroquinone, but bootleg versions are being sold with 4 percent to 5 percent, said Dominique Tinkler, the manager of product development for Fair & White’s American distributor, the Mitchell Group. “We see it in New York, Miami, Chicago,” Ms. Tinkler said. “I mean it’s everywhere now.”

One unusual side effect of misusing hydroquinone is a blue-black darkening of the skin. Dr. Battle said he never used to see such cases, but in the last five years his Washington practice had treated them monthly. The food and drug agency has been considering a ban on over-the-counter sales of hydroquinone since 2006, and it is already banned in England and France.

Doctors said some consumers wrongly assumed that all ingredients were disclosed on labels. “There’s a basic assumption that there’s some truth in labeling,” said Dr. David McDaniel, a dermatologist in Virginia Beach and a director of the Skin of Color Research Institute at Hampton University. “That’s a false assumption for the skin-lightening market.”

Mrs. Ross of Brooklyn, who described herself as a onetime “queen of bleaching creams,” is recovering now with the help of her dermatologist from Kings County Hospital Center. “I went through a terrible depressed phase,” she said. “I wanted to go back to use the creams a couple of months back. I just decided to ride it out with my dermatologist.”

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