Rip-Offs 101
The prices of college textbooks are ridiculous. But solving the problem is more complicated than students think.
There are a few things college students can count on every fall: all-nighters, keg parties, new features on Facebook, and textbooks that cost a small fortune. Books and supplies set most students back about $900 a year, and prices have risen an average of 6 percent annually for the past two decades – twice the rate of inflation and just slightly lower than the rise in tuition and fees. It's become so exorbitant that politicians are even weighing in. State Representative Steven Walsh of Lynn has filed a bill aimed at lowering the cost of books. Finally, students might be thinking, those greedy college bookstores will get what's coming to them. But stores aren't really causing the price problem, and they alone can't fix it.
It makes sense that college booksellers would get a bad rap. After shelling out $400 to $600 at the start of a semester, many students return to stores after finals, only to be stunned by how little they get for selling books back. An oceanography book that cost me more than $100 four years ago as a freshman fetched all of three bucks. But the buyback prices are largely based on what used-book wholesalers will pay for a book, and those prices are determined by the anticipated demand the following semester, which is low if the book isn't widely used or a new edition is coming out. And when you buy a new book, the average markup at college bookstores is comparable to that of traditional US retailers.
So if the stores aren't to blame, then who is? Many other state legislatures have been looking at textbook publishers lately, and rightly so. Publishers say their prices help cover the high cost of developing new supplements and technological tools needed for today's courses. But a couple of states, Washington and Connecticut, have passed legislation to curb some practices by publishers, such as bundling books so students are forced to buy a supplementary workbook or CD, not disclosing prices to instructors, and issuing new editions too frequently. New versions of McGraw-Hill's Philosophy: The Power of Ideas, an introductory text, were published in 2002, 2004, and 2007. Have the basics of Plato and Nietzsche really changed that much in the new millennium? Even in his ever-shifting field, Michael Corgan, an international relations professor at Boston University who is also an author, says that “one out of three new editions of textbooks I have looked at are really unnecessary.”
Walsh's bill, which will be discussed at a hearing next month, would require bundled books to also be sold separately and for publishers to make wholesale-price lists available to faculty members, who can have more of an impact on this issue than they realize. For example, in a new guaranteed buyback program at UMass-Amherst, professors commit to a book for at least two semesters, allowing the campus bookstore to resell them for a cheaper price the following semester. A student paying $100 for a new book this semester would be guaranteed $50 back; the following semester, someone returning the book would recoup $25. But only about a quarter of the faculty participate. Why? Mainly because they don't want to commit to a book for more than one semester, and they'd have to get their orders in earlier (April for the fall semester), according to Richard Rogers, a statistics instructor and faculty adviser to the provost. Even at schools without guaranteed buyback programs, the lag in ordering, which prevents a bookstore from retaining more used copies, is a problem.
Ultimately, significant price reduction is possible only if we assess the whole crazy system. If Walsh's bill passes, it will be a step in the right direction, but for students to see real change, professors would need to use the new information when selecting books. And we need to examine bigger questions: Should college bookstores be nonprofit? Are large-scale rental programs feasible? Would students buy more e-books if they were available? For now, a little coaxing by college administrators would help faculty pick books earlier. Then, schools could make book lists available over breaks, and students would have more time to comparison-shop at other stores or online.
Buying textbooks online crossed my mind once. The problem was, I hadn't been able to find out what books I needed until the first day of class, and, by then, at least 100 pages of reading were hanging over my head. So I did what many students do: I slapped down my shiny new Visa card for a shiny new book and braced myself for another new subject: debt.
Jenna Pelletier, a freelance writer in Rhode Island, is a recent graduate of Boston University. E-mail her at jennapelletier@gmail.com.
