Since .xxx domains opened to the public last month, colleges and universities across the country have been snapping them up in a well-documented rush to protect the integrity of their .edu domains — and their institutions at large.

Penn State, Northwestern, Michigan and Texas A&M universities are among the many big-name institutions that have reportedly bought out .xxx domains to prevent them from being used by adult content sites trying to trade off of those schools’ names. The purchases are also meant to prevent domain squatters from buying domains and selling them to the highest bidder for presumably similar purposes.

While this story has made for good copy in one news outlet after another, the question remains: Is it worth it to schools to spend thousands of dollars trying to outwit would-be swindlers and pornographers?

Experts say the answer depends largely on the size of your school — and your budget.

“If you are a bigger school… that people know, there’s a bigger risk of domain squatting,” said Kate Hutchinson, the manager of marketing and social media at United Domains, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based domain company.

Many such larger schools chose to buy up multiple domains tangentially related to their university .edu domains during an official sunrise period, during which the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) gave priority to certain .xxx domains to trademark holders. Such schools have nothing to worry about for the life of those domain registrations, which can run anywhere from one to 10 years.

Those that did not buy at that time but still wish to must now decide if it is worth the cost. Depending on which registrar is selling them, .xxx domains can range in price from $79 to $200, said Hutchinson, and schools can spend several hundred to tens of thousands of dollars trying to buy up all the .xxx domains they can think of.

“With all due respect, a few thousand dollars isn’t that much in most colleges or universities’ budgets,” said Jonathan Coopersmith, a professor of technology history at Texas A&M.

“Think of it as buying insurance,” he said.

But while that insurance may not seem like a lot of money to large universities, it may be more significant to small- and medium-sized schools. Yet, by virtue of their smaller statures and lower profiles, such schools may not be targets the same way that big state schools are. So before spending big bucks on that reputational safeguard, schools should do a little research, said Hutchinson.

In addition to a financial assessment, she recommends that school officials do a risk assessment by searching student forums and Facebook pages for any evidence that their own students might be considering – and discussing on the web – their intention to buy a .xxx domain affiliated with their school, something that Hutchinson said is common.

Should they see the need, Coopersmith thinks it is worth the cost to schools to try to protect their reputation. The University of Colorado is among the first institutions to find out the hard way what happens when they don’t, and the results are less than desirable.

But James Kelley, an independent internet strategy consultant, said that trying to think of every .xxx domain name that is tangentially related to one’s own would most likely be an expensive proposition, and one that would ultimately be fruitless.

“[I]t would be costly to buy all domain extensions that are available or could become available,” he said.

Kelley said schools need to be prepared to take legal action based on trademark infringement if actual problems do arise, which is precisely the approach that the University of Illinois chose to take last month when it opted not to buy up .xxx domains peripheral to its main .edu domains

Ultimately, schools must look both outward and inward before deciding.

“I think that’s a decision that each institution has to make on its own,” said Ray Betzner, a spokesman for Temple University. Betzner said that Temple, which has an undergraduate enrollment of nearly 28,000 students, purchased multiple .xxx domains during the sunshine period, though he declined to specify how many or how much the school spent on them.

Whether or not the .xxx buying craze is a safe investment or a panicked waste of money won’t be known until later this spring when all of the domains that are being bought right now are allotted, said Hutchinson.

It’s also hard to tell how much of a threat this really is and how much it may be a minor trend overblown by excessive media coverage, said Coopersmith, yet it’s also possible that the increased exposure could exacerbate the otherwise minor problem.

Another troubling possibility, said Coopersmith, is that it could also spawn a domain-squatting rush on other non-.edu urls like .com and .net and .biz. Those may not have the pornographic panache of .xxx, but opportunistic smut peddlers might gamble on them all the same.

“That’s the wider story here,” said Coopersmith.