• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Colleges, Students Take Aim at Expensive Book Costs

Posted on: Thursday, 21 August 2008, 15:15 CDT

By David M Brown

Serious efforts to rein in the soaring costs of college textbooks are gaining traction.

Congress has passed a higher education bill that includes provisions aimed at reducing textbook costs. At the same time, more students are buying books online to save money and professors are becoming more cost-conscious when picking required reading.

Allison Pogue, 21, of Penn Township in Westmoreland County, a senior at Duquesne University majoring in biology, will be taking graduate courses for a master's degree in education.

Her costs for textbooks this semester would be at least $650 if she bought them from the bookstore. By using online sources such as Half.com and Amazon.com, Pogue estimates the same books will cost about $300.

"It's a huge savings," Pogue said. "As a freshman I assumed textbooks would be expensive, but I greatly underestimated how much I would be spending on them."

The education bill, which passed the House and Senate with strong bipartisan support, requires textbook publishers to share pricing information with professors and "unbundle" books from accompanying materials. The practice of bundling textbooks with supplementary items such as CDs partly explains why textbooks cost about $900 per student every year, according to a Government Accounting Office study in 2005.

The GAO calculated that textbooks made up about a fourth of the cost of tuition and fees at four-year public colleges and universities. Schools in this region reflect those costs. The University of Pittsburgh estimates that books and supplies cost students $600 to $1,000 a year, while Carnegie Mellon University estimates it at $966 a year.

A key provision in the bill, signed by President Bush a week ago, encourages and will help fund start-up costs for textbook rental programs, said Rep. Jason Altmire, D-McCandless. Altmire is member of the House Education and Labor Committee who sat on the conference committee that worked out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill.

"When you get on campus, you definitely hear about the cost of textbooks," Altmire said. "The cost of books comes up all the time because students can't believe they have to pay $200 for a textbook they are going to use for a semester and then sell back for 35 bucks.

"They really feel like there is a better way to do it," he said.

There are only 25 textbook rental programs at U.S. colleges and universities. Other schools are interested in starting the program, but officials say the start-up costs are prohibitive, according to a congressional study in 2006. Students typically can rent a textbook for about one-third or less the cost of a new text, the study found.

The University of Central Missouri bookstore operates a rental program consisting of 258 undergraduate titles and 16,500 volumes. The flat-rate rental fee is $36 per book, compared to an average new retail price of $110. A similar program at Bowling Green State University in Ohio rents books for 35 percent of the new textbook selling price.

Cost doesn't reflect quality

Pitt math professor Juan Manfredi is among hundreds of faculty members across the nation who signed a statement of intent to use free, online, open-source textbooks whenever appropriate.

"It's based on my conviction that the price of the textbook doesn't correlate directly with the quality," Manfredi said. "I hear that the whole thing is going to change the same way the music industry has changed. Most people now -- I myself -- buy music online, and I only buy the song that I want. I don't have to buy a complete CD.

"The same thing is going to happen with textbooks," he said. "Students in the past were forced to buy a big, thick book, probably for three courses, but they may only take the first part of the course. So why spend $200 on a book that you are only going to use $66 (worth of the book's value)?"

Robert Pego, a math professor at CMU, signed the letter circulated by the Student PIRGs -- Public Interest Research Groups - - in a campaign to reduce textbook costs.

For an honors math studies course last school year, Pego selected a textbook that cost about $60 compared to one that lists for $166. Both are good books, he said.

"In that case, the more expensive one was a sort of classic in its subject. A lot of universities just want to more or less use that book by default," Pego said.

Nick Smarto, 21, a senior at CMU majoring in mechanical engineering, plans to wait until after his first round of classes next week before ordering his textbooks from online sources.

"I used to buy from the student bookstore on campus, but they charge full value for those textbooks. I've been trying the last couple of semesters to order those same textbooks from Amazon.com or equivalent Web sites."

Books ordered online typically arrive several days after the course has started, as opposed to books available at the bookstore before the first class. That means borrowing a book until yours arrives, Smarto said. Also, students must be careful when ordering from online sources not to get an earlier edition of a textbook which doesn't have the most current information on a subject, he said.

Source: Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

More News in this Category