Rising textbook costs alienate new college students
Gary Sundt - April 17th, 2008A mass e-mail was sent out to NAU students Monday regarding a national press conference calling for free textbooks. To be more specific: open textbooks. “Open textbooks” are free content, licensed to allow anyone to use, download, customize or print without expressed permission from the author. Apparently, all we had to do is show up, and we’d make a statement. Today is Thursday. Are textbooks free yet?
Anyone who has purchased any textbook ever has probably noticed the unreasonable cost. This goes the same for simply attending college in the first place. It’s hard to say this should be changed, because a college education simply cannot be free. But when The New Yorker estimates that college students collectively spend an estimated $5 billion on books alone, the question regarding bang for buck must be raised.
The advent of open textbooks is an interesting opportunity for college students. The ability to access online encyclopedias has only proved the potential for free knowledge.
But do publishers want information to be free? Publishing companies insist that prices have remained consistent, but the students’ empty pocket books suggest otherwise. So does the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which estimates “in the last two decades, college textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation.”
A congressional committee has been working to change this contradictory message to America’s rising scholars. Two California Congressmen — Rep. Howard P. McKeon, a Republican, and Rep. George Miller, a Democrat — have introduced a bill that outlines new provisions regarding textbooks.
House bill H.R. 4137 outlines several solutions that would help with textbook prices. Firstly, publishers would need to tell faculty what kind of hole these textbooks would burn into scholars’ pockets. The New York Times suggests that, currently, “the average textbook promotion to faculty members (resembles) old-style restaurant menus for women that did not include prices.” The thought behind this is professors generally don’t need to worry about prices, so go ahead and order that porterhouse.
The House bill would also require publishers to quit bundling textbooks with CDs and other whatnot. Publishers claim that these extras are vital, and in many cases, more important than the text itself. What’s the textbook useful for then? If the information students need is provided by the widgets alone… well, you don’t buy a steak for lunch when the dinner salad will do just fine.
Were the bill enacted, schools would also have to post the required and recommended reading long before students need to begin shopping. This would allow the student body more than enough time to shop for the best deals via online sellers and used bookstores.
The necessity of these books seems to be becoming less and less evident. A student can oftentimes get an A in a class without purchasing the text, because the class resource is not the book, it’s the teacher.
Book prices, however, are small potatoes. The cost of college tuition alone is ever rising. Too many students need the too-few scholarships. While healthy competition is most certainly a good thing, we need bright minds to run this country. With our current administration, we’ve already been provided a shining example of what happens when only rich kids get to go to Yale.
However, Congress should still do what it can to help. Escalating book prices are one of the many factors that are causing the light of higher education to become dimmer by the day for upcoming high school graduates. In an America where a bachelor’s degree is, in most cases, the deciding factor between Microsoft and McDonald’s, this is not a reasonable problem.
April 17th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Thank you for your interest in the rising costs of textbooks, Gary. I wanted to mention a few things in regards to your article.
You begin this editorial with a bite of sarcasm toward the students who are advocating for high-quality, low-cost textbooks. Perhaps this energy can be channeled more productively into opening dialogues with your professors on open education resources and open textbooks so they might adopt them over more expensive publisher created content. You could also call Sen. McCain and Sen. Kyl and ask them to add the textbook amendment to the HEA.
As for the issue of tuition, textbooks and tuition costs cannot be compared. Tuition is a matter of state taxes, state funding and politics. Textbooks are an issue of companies raping a captivated market place. Textbooks, housing and food costs are all important issues to look at separately from tuition.
It is foolish to suggest we will have all our textbooks for free over night. But this can almost be the case for several subjects. Please visit the ASNAU office and we will show you what a free textbook looks like. Today is indeed Thursday, and you can have free textbooks.