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.

 

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4 Comments

  1. For colleges and universities, the state does not determine the textbooks that are used, like at Blinn or TAMU. Usually, a group of professors who teach the course select the textbook, and often there is negotiation with the book company to get the lowest price possible. At some universities, each professor can select the book she or he wants to use. I often suggest to my students to buy a Kindle or iPad or laptop and rent downloadable textbooks online. Within a couple of semesters, if not sooner, the device is paid for, and overall textbook cost for the students drops.

    To be honest, many students who don’t do well in college have never bought a textbook and don’t read them. And open source textbooks often are not current and simply not that good. Textbooks are part of the investment in a student’s future.

    Another way to save $$$$ is attend Blinn,which is a really great value, stay for 60 hours, work hard, learn to study well, then transfer to TAMU, which is also a great value. Both places have installment plans, take credit cards, and are relatively inexpensive.

  2. It is a racket designed by the state agency that determines what text books shall be used, and the publishers lobbyists. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out where the money goes. This is a deliberate attempt to make it more difficult for the student with few resources to obtain an education. The thinking in our state house is that if the young people in the lower social economic/ ethnic groups don’t go to school and learn critical thinking skills, they won’t go to the polls to vote for their opponents.

  3. Another sad part to this is that the professors require you to have the books and then do not use them or use them only once or twice. I know that my math books were seldom used or even followed in class, the only book that I used on a regular basis was my English Composition book. I had to read several stories in that one.

  4. The sad part is that students spend all the money on books and the teachers do not even use them throughout the course. My son some kind of way got through college with only buying his math books. That was his major. Surviving I guess.

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