When a new semester rolls around, students know they are going to break the bank on one thing alone.
Purchasing textbooks.
Since 2006, the cost of a college textbook has increased by 73 percent, which happens to be more than four times the rate of inflation – according to Covering the Cost, a report from the nonprofit Student Public Interest Research Groups, otherwise known as PIRGs.
Kayla Stephens, a graduate student in the Texas Tech counseling program, says the increase is unreasonable.
“We are paying thousands of dollars for education,” Stephens said, “on top of almost paying thousands of dollars for textbooks alone. I think it is ridiculous how education is now coming at a much steeper price then what it was back in the day.”
Lauren Garcia, a senior kinesiology major, said each semester she spends an average of $1,000 on textbooks and is never happy about it. She says the high price come from the cost of her science textbooks.
“My science classes are usually the most expensive textbooks,” Garcia said, “which is kind of surprising just because for kinesiology, those textbooks are often cheaper. So, it’s the biology, genetics and chemistry [textbooks] – it’s the core sciences that are the most expensive, rather than the major [specific] classes.”
During her first semester at Texas Tech, Garcia said she spent around $800 on textbooks and was completely flabbergasted by the total cost, since she was not expecting it to be so expensive. Garcia said now she sits down with her mother and plans accordingly each semester.
“The semester before,” she explained, “we always sit down and budget living expenses, the cost of tuition and then we always have to make sure to look at what classes I’m taking because depending on what classes, I can usually kind of figure out how much my textbooks are going to be.”
College Board estimates around $1,250 is spent on textbooks and supplies at four-year universities in state and out of state for the 2016-2017 academic year.
The PIRG report blames soaring prices on two factors: lack of competition and no consumer choice.
Currently, five publishers control 80 percent of the market, made up of Cengage Learning, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson Education and Scholastic. With only five competitive publishers on the market, they are able to drive up prices without fear of other market competitors. No consumer choice comes from college professors assigning specific editions, even though there may not be many differences in material between two editions. The content of some courses can change, but nowhere to the point of creating brand new editions.
According to the National Association of College Stores, more than 77 cents of every dollar spent on textbooks goes to the publisher. Of the 77 cents, the publishing company makes around 18 cents in profit, 15 cents goes to marketing and about 32 cents goes to cover the costs of paper, printing and employee salaries.
The craziest statistic?
The author(s), who spend hundreds of hours researching, writing and editing, only receive 12 cents within that dollar.
However, there are ways to lower the costs of textbooks.
Every semester, Garcia does her research. She looks online at the Texas Tech University Official Bookstore, Amazon and Chegg, an online rental textbook company. After looking back and forth at prices, she purchases the textbook with the lowest price from the three.
“For the past three years, I’d say Amazon had the best prices,” Garcia says.
Even though renting is the easiest way to save a dollar, Stephens said it might be in graduate students best interests to purchase a textbook if they believe it will be useful in their careers.
There also is a potential policy solution to the issue.
Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken proposed a bill, called the Affordable College Textbook Act, which would create and expand the use of textbooks that can be made available online, with free access to the public. The bill would potentially save students billions of dollars without taking away the quality of reading materials. It was introduced on Oct. 8, 2015, in a previous Congress session, but was not enacted. Groups are not giving up, and are still working to reintroduce the plan to Congress in the future.
When choosing textbooks, Stephens says she wishes professors would take into account how some students pay for college themselves and should look at it from a student’s perspective. In undergrad, she said one of her professors decided to make the textbook accessible online for free, which was a big relief.
“When I read that email, I was like ‘oh, thank goodness’, because I looked that book up online on Amazon and it was $200,” she says. “I was so thankful for that because we were able to print off certain sections that we knew we had to read. Then there were about five or six different sections in the book that we didn’t even touch. I understand why we need textbooks, I just don’t understand why they have to be so expensive.”
Source: Huffington Post
Garcia noted professors should consider whether or not students will use the textbook, whether or not it is the most reliable source of information and if so, if it would be easier for them to relay the details via PowerPoint in lectures instead of having to purchase the textbook.
“I know a lot of science teachers who help write these books,” Garcia says, “and so they require these books for their classes, but you only use those textbooks two to three times a semester. So, it’s only like they are doing that for their own personal advantage, which I think is completely unfair and unnecessary. I don’t think I have ever had a textbook where I have used it enough to say, ‘well okay, I spent $500 on that, but it was worth it’.”
About Abby Aldrich
