Buying textbooks can be painful. They’re overpriced and underused. Last semester I spent (well my parents spent) more than $400 on books. $400! That’s outrageous.
According to The College Board, students attending four-year public universities spent an average of $983 on books and supplies in the 2007 academic year, an increase of more than $300 over the previous seven years, according to The College Board.
Oklahoma legislators hope to ease this burden, though.
“The Oklahoma legislature will consider a bill this spring that would eliminate state and local sale taxes on on textbooks,” said an article in the The Daily, Oklahoma University’s student newspaper.
It was introduced by state rep. Wes Hilliard, D-Sulphur and is intended to “curb the rising cost of higher education.”
This bill is a step in the right direction. Hopefully it will get passed and other states will take notice. Even at a state school higher education costs, especiallytution, keep rising year after year. They’re getting out of control. We’re not made of money.
Recently the Associated Students of the University of Missouri have been pushing for the Textbook Transparency Bill. The bill would include disclosing textbook prices to faculty,unbundling prepackaged textbooks and allowing students to use leftover financial aid to purchase textbooks from university bookstores, said a recent article in the Columbia Missourian.
It would be nice to get more money back for textbooks during the bookstore buy back. It would also be nice if certain courses stopped requiring so many books. The ultimate relief would be a reduction in textbook prices. Will any of these happen? It’s very doubtful, but eliminating sales taxes on textbooks has a shot.
Oh well, costs probably won’t go down (in fact they’ll probably go up) but I can dream.
Here’s a thought: Stop making students BUY textbooks. There should be an easy way to determine rental costs for textbooks for a semester. In essence, that’s what students are doing anyway. You pay $200 for your Chem31 textbook only to return it at the end of the semester and receive $120 for it if you’re lucky. Shouldn’t the school just charge you $80 the first go around and then NOT charge you for the book when you bring it back by a specific date when the semester is over?
And another thing, what’s with the school making it necessary to have the latest version or edition of books that are not dependent on current events? I can understand that classes like political science and computer engineering need to keep up with an ever-changing and fast-paced world. But should an art history book be determined useless because it’s “last year’s” edition and the school is only purchasing new editions? Has anything changed in history, the renaissance, ancient greek literature, or Egyptian pottery in the last six months?
Bottom line, the place where you go to school is actually a business first, and an institute of higher education second. Ever wonder how much money a school makes when it has 24,000 undergrads all spending $983 on textbooks and supplies every year? I tested out of Math10, but my guess is somewhere around $24 million. Or how about the annual tuition at that same school, hovering around $8,000 (in-state) after you tack on most fees except room and board? Answer is $192 million. Now, for room and board: average 8,000 students living on campus, all paying around $7,000 room and board……………..$56 million. Now we’re hovering just over a QUARTER OF A BILLION dollars when you total these numbers together. By the way, we left out other sources of income like sports tickets/licensing/apparel, government donations, alumni donations, parking tickets, endowments.
It’s a long way to come to this point: Maybe disclosing book prices to faculty should be the lowest priority on this particular totem pole. Maybe getting this school to disclose how it is spending it’s arguable HALF BILLION dollar budget might be something to kick around. Seeing as how it exists under “Non-Profit” status, I’m pretty sure Uncle Sam has every right to take a look at those accounting records. Just a thought.
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In Germany, the Professors traditionally provide a script (“Skriptum”) which can usually be freely photocopied (the student only needs to cover the costs for copying). Would be an option, wouldn’t? It would be just fair to provide scripts to the students at American universities as they actually pay tuition (which is basically not the case in Germany!).