As this week has probably unpleasantly reminded you (or shocked you, if you’re a freshman), college textbooks can be nearly prohibitively expensive. Some students scrape by at the beginning of the term, shelling out an additional $300 on top of ballooning tuition — which this year for the first time topped $5,000 for the typical resident student. Others sometimes register for, or drop classes, based on the cost of the textbooks.
Some texts are massive, and massively expensive: The University Bookstore’s most expensive offering will leave a $198 dent in a biology or chemistry major’s bank account. For a student taking 16 credit hours, that adds 48 percent to the cost of the class.
In light of the high cost of textbooks — particularly when their buyers are students already largely financially restricted — the bookstore graciously offered a promotion that ran through Wednesday wherein the bookstore would give 13 randomly selected students their coursebooks for free. But, of course, the bookstore cannot afford to give away texts to every student.
Here are several suggestions to alleviate fiscal pressure on the University’s other 20,000 students:
* Departments should strongly consider cost when selecting primary texts. Many, if not all programs on campus, likely understand the importance of thriftiness to students and already factor pricing into decisions, but the cost of certain books suggests that monetary considerations sometimes take a back seat.
* Professors should assign secondary texts cautiously, too. Certainly, most classes need at least one book for grounding discussion or homework. But there’s usually little reason to assign a second “required” text from which only one chapter will be assigned. If the content is essential, perhaps the professor, or even a GTF, could create a packet or a handout that covers the same material. Not only would the packet be more finely tuned to the class’ specific themes and requirements, but it could be easily adjusted and re-used every term or year.
* Textbook publishing companies should strive to minimize differences among editions, as long as such conservatism doesn’t hurt the applicability of the material. Revamping texts every few years makes sense in rapidly changing fields like computer science or multimedia design, but rewriting swaths of Chinese history books or arbitrarily rewriting problems in a math book without changing content only makes it needlessly more difficult for cash-strapped students to save money by tracking down used, older editions.
Unfortunately, this suggestion clashes with book publishers’ interests: Publishers now cycle new editions on a biennial basis because people stop buying new copies of an edition once used ones become available, Chris Standish, the bookstore’s book division manager, said.
In the meantime, the texts professors assign are mostly out of your control. But there are at least a few options for cutting costs: The bookstore sells used textbooks for 25 percent off. Smith Family Bookstore and other local used book vendors sell at discounts, too. Finally, online services like TextbookX.com and Half.com often offer books at a slick discount, but you have to wait (and sometimes pay) for shipping.