How to cut cost of college texts

With students paying up to $1,000 yearly, advisory panel urges use of digital market.

By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 4, 2007 edition

Page 1 of 2

Will there be a truce in the battle over college-textbook prices?

Textbooks have become a flash point in the larger frustration over sharply rising college costs. In an attempt to get past finger-pointing, a new report highlights what publishers, policymakers, and faculty are doing, and can do, to give students some relief.

"Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable" is the culmination of a yearlong study by the federal Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, commissioned by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. (The full report is available at www.ed.gov/acsfa.)

Between 1987 and 2004, college-textbook prices have more than doubled; at four-year public colleges, for instance, they rose 109 percent. That significantly outpaced the 65 percent growth in the overall Consumer Price Index, the report notes. But it also puts the prices in a broader context: As a percentage of family income, they've risen only slightly.

Still, with textbooks costing an estimated $700 to $1,000 per year, many see that cost as an obstacle, particularly for low-income students. Books represent a little more than 2 percent of their income. At some community colleges, the bill at the bookstore is almost as high as tuition, the report says, and gaps in financial aid distribution leave some students short of money when it's time to buy course materials.

"I've had to drop classes because I can't afford the book – it's really frustrating," says Amber Vaillancourt, a student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Next semester she'll be chairing the affordable-books campaign for her chapter of MASSPIRG, a student-led research and advocacy group based in Boston. She opted not to buy some of the books for her classes last semester to keep her bill down to $250, but she found it difficult to access a reserve book at the library for an anthropology course because there was only one copy for a class of 300.

Student activists around the country have organized book swaps on campus and online and have lobbied faculty and legislatures about cost-saving measures. They've also protested publishers that bundle textbooks, software, and other materials – sometimes by sending back the extras they find unnecessary.

When books are bundled with digital materials, it's because professors request them, counters Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers in Washington. An economics book might come with a database tool, for instance. "The faculty is being pounded to educate students for the 21st century ... but those tools aren't free."

Page 1 | 2 | Next Page