Is the fear of textbook costs dumbing down college?

We should be careful not to exaggerate the rising cost of textbooks. According to the College Board numbers (see http://studentloan.citibank.com/slcsite/fr_hswhat.asp?), tuition at 2-year colleges is $2,076 and books and supplies are $773. That means that books are about 27% of educational expenses, not 72%. (And transportation is a substantially larger expense for students.) Also the figures listed for book expenses typically don’t account for what students get back selling textbooks.

And we should be aware of the costs of textbook rental programs: discouraging professors from assigning multiple books, forcing adjunct faculty to use assigned textbooks they don’t like, preventing students from keeping textbooks for future use.

The best rental programs are limited to those faculty and students who choose them: if a professor plans to use a textbook for several years, students can choose to rent textbooks rather than buying them.

There are other, better ways to reduce textbook costs: give awards to faculty who keep down textbook costs without hurting intellectual quality; improve communication between faculty and bookstores; increase the proportion of tenure-track faculty who can plan in advance what textbooks they’re using; and have competitive grants for faculty to write textbooks (or update older textbooks) which can be posted on the web for free and produced in cheap paperback editions.

John K. Wilson, at 7:35 am EST on March 23, 2006

A wording error in the original version of this story has been changed to reflect the accurate findings of the GAO survey. The first reader’s comments prompted the change.

Elia Powers, at 9:45 am EST on March 23, 2006

I teach a number of introductory courses where the life of a text should be at least 6 years. However, in these areas texts are revised (usually hardly at all) once every three years.

I believe that the major cause for this is the buyback policy of bookstores. Purblishers and authors are entitled to make a legitimate profit for their time and effort. When a book is bought back in large numbers its useful life for new sales as at best three, and probably only, two years. Therefore prices have to be set accordingly.

Doing a bit of simple arithmetic shows that if a book had a useful life of 6 years rather than 2 a text which sold for $120 now could sell for $40 and still provide the same return to authors and publishers. Perhaps to account for the fact that authors would get work less frequently the price might be set at $60.

When a bookstore buys back a text it originally sold for $120 the student does not get back $60. Assume the bookstore is very generous and buys the book back for $50. The net cost to the student was $70.

So which would be a better deal for the students — Not selling back a $60 book, or paying $70 net for selling back the $120 book?

Despite the logic of the above nothing will change as long as students students continue to sell back books and bookstores continue to buy them back. Given the current situation new?!! editions will continue to appear on a three year cycle whether they are really needed or not.

SG, Professor of Chemistry at 4-year college, at 10:05 am EST on March 23, 2006

I wonder if “rental” would mean that a residual would need to be paid to the author.

Henry Vandenburgh, at 10:21 am EST on March 23, 2006

Another way in which we are contributing to the dumbing down of American college students...at least in sociology, textbooks tend to present a de-intellectualized and patronizing view of the discipline, while readers and monographs allow students to develop capacities in critical analysis. If I could help it, I would never use a textbook, and so far, I never have.

I do everything I can to reduce the cost of books for my students. I always do my best to make sure all the readings are available on reserve. But the number one way to reduce textbook costs is to not use textbooks at all, and to rather use readers and monographs that are available in paperback, supplemented by some additional readings on the now-ubiquitous e-reserves systems. In fact, the most significant increase in cost I have seen over my years in academia is the increased fear of litigation that causes colleges to refuse to keep book chapters or articles available on reserve for more than one semester.

The single thing that would make the biggest difference in the money that students I know have to spend on books would be a liberalization of copyright law.

ML, Sociology Instructor at New York, at 12:40 pm EST on March 23, 2006

Books

ML is absolutely right. Too many colleges insist on new additions that are little more than reshuffling the pictures in the last edition — which makes textbook purchases much more expensive for students.

Another great idea to take into consideration is trying to use more books for which the copyright has expired and then putting them online for your class instead of having the students buy from a publisher. (This for primary sources, not textbooks.)

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 1:35 pm EST on March 23, 2006

bookstore/library partnerships

At the University of Oregon, the bookstore and libraries are working together to provide cost-reducing options where possible and appropriate. See http://duckhenge.uoregon.edu/io/article.php?id=401for an overview.

The major strategies on the library’s side are a) putting textbooks on reserve, andb) as an alternative to coursepacks, helping faculty provide access to licensed full-text articles (usually via links on Blackboard), &/or paper or e-reserves. Our institutional libraries license a vast array of content at great cost, and we need to take full advantage of this investment. This strategy also helps expose more students to primary sources (digital or analog) and other library resources and services.

On the cost of textbooks, we’ve heard from the Bookstore that students don’t complain about expensive textbooks *if* they are fully used throughout the course. They really resent being required to buy a $100+ text, only to find that their professor only uses a few chapters.

Ultimately, these are faculty development and curricular planning issues. I encourage faculty to work collaboratively with their libraries and bookstores to keep costs down for our students without compromising instructional goals.

Andrew Bonamici, Associate University Librarian at University of Oregon, at 11:30 am EST on March 24, 2006

While the idea of using a previous edition is a good one it is often not practical where there are large (or perhaps even moderate sized)classes. There is no centralized location from which students would be able to obtain the texts and although the internet might be a logical source there may or may not be enough of a particular book to go around. We have even had difficulty getting a previous edition to use once a new edition has come out (we use the same edition in the summer and for off-sequence fall courses so sometimes we are in fact using two different editions of a text). I would love to use Pauling’s General Chemistry which is available very inexpensively from Dover Press. However, I know that my student’s would be unable to understand it. Look at the level of writing in texts from 20-30 years ago and compare it with today.

SG, Professor of Chemistry, at 9:50 am EST on March 30, 2006

textbooks

To what extent is this row about textbook prices really about publishers and professors? I have noticed that over the past five years or so, all manifestations of immaturity and anti-intellectualism among students has been on the rise. Late or nonexistent papers, demands for make-up exams, rampant absenteeism, absurd excuses, and other evidences of of sheer immaturity are pandemic. Is “refusal to buy the book” part of this trend, and not mere economics?

josh dilley, adjunct lecturer, at 12:00 am EST on January 28, 2007