STUDENTS HURT BY SOARING COLLEGE TEXTBOOK PRICES

  

It's textbook season again, the time of year students’ dread.

Runaway tuition costs have long captured attention. But it's the added, often unexpected expenses of books and supplies that can hurt college students, especially those on financial aid.

The College Board estimates that on average, a student attending a public college spent $1,207 on books and supplies during the 2013-2014 academic year. Between 1978 and 2012, textbook prices climbed by 812 percent, far outdoing costs of medical care, new homes and consumer costs.

Now colleges are beginning to fight back. Universities are banding together to negotiate volume discounts with publishers. College libraries put more textbooks on reserve for students to borrow.

Some professors write open-source textbooks that students access for free, but some critics see the book as a creature of a textbook publishing oligopoly.

Yet even as the open-source movement makes inroads, most college course materials continue to be commercially published, at sometimes unmanageable prices

 Some campus bookstores won't sell such students textbooks until the holds placed on their accounts are removed, he said.

Thirty-four percent of students in the survey said they couldn't buy textbooks in time for the first day of classes. Sixty-seven percent said that availability of their financial aid had affected their ability to buy books before classes began.