Not all talk is cheap. Especially not if it comes from the mouths of professors, former corporate executives, or Washington insiders who understand the workings of the $20-billion for-profit higher-education industry and how impending tougher regulations might affect it. Then the talk can be worth hundreds of dollars an hour, thanks to the growing role of "expert networks" now focused on the for-profit college sector. The networks are banks of on-call experts who get paid to speak privately about trends to the networks' clients. The clients are hedge funds and other investors, which pay handsomely--$40,000 a year, in some cases--for that ready access. Expert networks have become increasingly significant players on the Wall Street scene in the past decade, and recently, with allegations that some of them have been involved in insider trading, they have become controversial, too. In the for-profit higher-education industry, where the involvement of expert networks is only about two years old--and where there have been no known charges of insider trading--their growing use coincides with the coming of new federal regulations and rising attention on the sector from Congress and the Department of Education. Expert-network companies rely heavily on academics, particularly for clients that invest in information technology, biotechnology, and the pharmaceutical industries. Only a handful of the three-dozen expert-network companies known to service Wall Street specialize in for-profit higher education, with firms like Gerson, the Coleman Research Group, and the Marwood Group among the most prominent. The services run as a two-way street, with expert-network companies sometimes offering up their experts in conference calls, and sometimes with clients posting requests to the networks for an expert to answer their questions.