College textbooks are too expensive, say students, and they want other optionsfrom the Cleveland Plain Dealer
More than 65 percent of college students say they have not bought a textbook because of its high price and nearly half say that textbook costs can dictate whether they take a course, according to a report by student Public Interest Research Groups.
Over the past decade, college textbook prices have increased by 82 percent, or three times the rate of inflation, making them one of the biggest out of pocket expenses for students and families, according to the report, “Fixing the Broken Textbooks Market: How Students Respond to High Textbook Costs and Demand Alternatives,” released this week by the Ohio PIRG Education Fund.
Students pay an average of $1,200 on books and supplies each year, according to the College Board. In fall 2013, student research groups surveyed 2,039 students from more than 150 campuses in 33 states, including Ohio, about college textbooks. A majority of students said they want other options than having to purchase textbooks.
more misery...
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from Patty...The article above is one I've read a bunch of times over the past few years. I remember the first time I had sticker shock as I walked through the campus bookstore and realized my students were paying more than $300 for my assigned books, including 2 that I really didn't use very much.
I started to spend more time each break figuring out how to cut costs. There are all kinds of ways to do this.
Q: Do you know, within $20 or so, what your texts cost your students? Do you think that's reasonable? If not, what are you doing about textbook costs? Share any and all ideas below in the whinging section, er, the comments!
I'm extremely lucky in this regard, inasmuch as most of the texts used in undergrad classes in my field (particularly) are either: individual papers I can post on the course's LMS; or in the public domain, with cheap editions available from Penguin or Hackett. In grad school, I once got all seven of the required texts for under fifty bucks.
ReplyDeleteOf course, math and science folk get hosed here, and graphics - especially color graphics - cost money, and to the extent that humanities textbooks are starting to look more like magazines, their costs are going up, too. I am currently saddled with a ridiculously broad Humanities survey (art, literature, philosophy, and history from Sumeria to Shakespeare in fifteen weeks - whee!) that uses a textbook that has the dimensions of a coffee table book, with heavy, glossy paper and TONS of color pictures, and that thing is just stupidly expensive. I would have never chosen that book, but, sadly, it's out of my hands. In my own courses, though, I can keep costs pretty low. I know students appreciate this, but I also realize it's a lucky happenstance of my field, and none of my own doing.
Coursepacks used to be the way to go, but now their prices are sky high as well.
ReplyDeleteLuckily I have 2 classes that meet in "tech" rooms and I've started replacing about 50% of my readings with articles I scout out online first.
It's a story we all know - my text (the latest edition, with one thing you wanted fixed and 10 things you didn't! Plus PICTURES!) was too far north of $100...for a humanities course?!?!?! I noted that more and more students were choosing not to purchase the text, and my class averages were going down. Frankly, a top student would have zero problems acing the course with only the lectures, but too many of the flakes were, well, flakes.
ReplyDeleteBut it really bothers me that so many make the calculation not to purchase when it does seem to impact their final grade - by a letter grade or two. I guess in their minds they are in it to pass it, and that is pretty easily possible without the text.
I eventually changed my syllabus to include a statement regarding the "required" text. Is it required to pass? No. Is it required to get an A? Yes.
Another item, related to this - it drives me INSANE that the bookstore orders less than half the number of texts that my students need. We have managed to get the students credit at the bookstore until loans come in (hopefully reducing the cost calculations on their part) but then the damn store runs out!
My students can buy an ebook or rent the book from the bookstore/publisher. My department has considered custom publishing in order to cut out chapters we don't use but we use enough of the general content that it's not worth it.
ReplyDeleteBack in the days of yore... when I was an undergrad the book store only printed half the course packs for the students in a class. When the professor complained to them the manger apparently claimed it was people were buying books used on line so they only ordered half of everything.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to know his justification for doing that with a course pack where the only place to get it was the book store.
He didn't have a justification - he probably didn't have any concept of the difference.
DeleteI teach comp and lit, and have the freedom to design my courses how I like (meaning sans textbooks). Instead, for the comp courses I pick non-fiction books in paperback that can be picked up for .99 plus shipping on alibris.com. My lit courses are a bit different--for big surveys, I use Norton, which is expensive but since I use it heavily, justifiable. For the more "niche" courses, everything's in paperback.
ReplyDeleteI teach at an open access institution where many of my students are first-gen and even the comparatively small amount they need to spend gives them sticker shock. They've never had to pay for anything for the last 13 years of their public education. I have had to be very clear on the first day that they must buy all of the texts listed on the syllabus, and I give them the order in which they need them so that if their financial aid is slow in coming, they don't buy all the books for one class and then have nothing left over for the others. There is no way even the very best, most engaged student could pass the class without the texts, because their writing assignments are based on the reading. Once they understand this, and they understand that I'm not wasting their money, I don't get much pushback.
Like the Beaker, I teach chemistry - three courses, with three sets of textbooks.
ReplyDeleteMy lower-level majors' course is the most expensive: it weighs in at about $250, but the books can be used for two semesters (not everyone takes the second semester, but that's their problem). I custom-publish the lab manual at considerable savings, but it's not worth it to do so with the textbook. Or students could rent the textbook and save about $100; they would then have to buy the online problem sets.
My upper-level course uses a text that retails for $130 on Amazon, but can usually be had for $50 or so.
My non-majors' course is about $80 for all materials: two books and an online problem set.
Most of my students never saw their textbooks as an investment in their future careers. When they went into industry, the information in those same books might give them the answers they were looking if they were trying to solve some on-the-job problem as many companies don't have much of a library.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, they never saw it that way.
Even before they get a job, their introductory science or engineering books are useful in advanced classes. But you're right. They never see it that way.
DeleteI teach physics and my students' book costs varies with the course. The intro course for majors and engineering students uses a book that costs close to $300, plus they have to buy workbooks and lab manuals. They can use everything but the lab manuals for two semesters, but like introvert's students, not everyone takes the second semester course. They can also buy an older edition or a used book, but then they have to spend another $100 for access to the online homework (that we are more or less required to use, because it saves on TA costs) that comes with the newest edition of the text. Or they can just buy the online access by itself, but then they don't get the book. And they need the book. In my honors section of that course I'm test running a completely online option from a different publisher that only costs $40/semester, plus the workbooks and lab manual, so they can get everything for roughly $85 the first semester and $50 the second and we'll see how that goes, but I'm only a lecturer and the tenured chair of the textbook committee who has been teaching this course since the dawn of the dinosaur age is very attached to the current textbook and I haven't been able to convince him that any other option will work for the students for the last 5 years, so I don't hold out too much hope that I'll be able to do it with this. But at least I'll have data and he'll be retiring relatively soon and I'm the person who has been teaching this class the longest after him, so I'll have a much better chance of changing it up at that time.
ReplyDeleteFor my non-majors courses, I can do more or less whatever I want and I've managed to get costs down to under $100 for each course. I'm fairly comfortable with that.
I checked out the price on the shelf of one text at several university bookstores. There was a price range difference of $12 from lowest to highest with my uni being second highest. It makes it rather tough to know the costs when the bookstore adds in additional fees to the price.
ReplyDeleteAs if it matters. This term I have a $30 text. Nobody has opened it and half of them are still in the bookstore. But they all have $5 lattes when they walk in late.
I have found some smaller publishers put out fine textbooks at around 50 bucks (they may or may not have lots of bells and whistles for the students in terms of the websites and additional sources). I also allow my students to use the previous edition of a textbook in most classes and this often solves a lot of cost issues. I'm also at a CC.
ReplyDeleteGiven that all of us have spent more time in school than any of our students, yes, we are very aware of how much textbooks cost. I switch texts from time to time if I find a lower-priced one that has the material that I need, and in some cases, for my comp lit classes, I don't use a text at all and instead choose lit pieces that I know are available for free online.
ReplyDeleteMostly, I educate my students about the fact that faculty have nothing to do with setting textbook prices nor how often textbooks come out in new editions. Most of us do what we can to provide the best materials to our students at low costs.
Non-majors' course -- I don't decide which book to order, but I do make it clear that everything they'll be tested on comes only out of my lectures; I won't test them on anything in the book that doesn't also roll forth from my lips. I do give them readings in the textbook as back-up, and if they want to make use of those, they can. Some do. Some don't. This semester I'm going to survey the class and see if reading the textbook makes any difference.
ReplyDeleteService course for education majors -- I do the same with the big textbook, adding the caveat that since there's not much difference between recent editions, I don't really care which one they get -- the 27th edition can be had for pennies and it's just as good for my purposes as the very expensive 29th. They also have to read three books (chosen from three lists) and write reports on them, but copies of almost all of them are available in our library, most are also in the town library, and if they still want to buy them, most are available on Amazon.com for $10-$25 each new. (I did have a student once who complained that he couldn't do the assignment because he'd ordered his books from Amazon but they were just taking forever to ship them. . . I now inform everyone at the start of the semester not to try that excuse. And not to claim that terrorists shot down the book delivery drone, either.)
Big majors' course -- instead of a textbook, I distribute research papers: some review papers, some from the primary literature. The problem here is that many of them are utterly buffaloed by having to read, like, real, not pre-digested articles. I have to be careful that our discussion sections don't end up with me explaining the whole reading to them in a monologue. But more of my colleagues are doing this, so more of my students have been exposed to scholarly prose enough not to shut down when presented with jargon or technical terms.
I'm actually feeling pretty good this year about textbook prices. We went the custom textbook route, as we only use about one-third of the massive 1st year science text, and the custom text ended up costing $35 - a far cry from the $150-170 for the custom text.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how many instructors and courses are able to go this route, but multiple publishers ferociously compete for our business (every year I fill another foot and a half of bookshelf space with complimentary textbooks sent to me by sales reps) because 'getting the contract' to supply the required text for a massive 1st year science course is still worth many tens of thousands of dollars in sales, even at the $40 custom text price, so they're willing to bend and give us what we want if we demand it. We consciously decided to make textbook changes purposely to reduce textbook costs, and made a low text price a condition of getting our business (also, for 1st year science, multiple textbooks are near carbon copies of each other, using the same classical experiments as examples (and this makes sense, because they are excellent examples), so we don't sweat much about which exact textbook we're going to pick). If we hadn't decided to make an issue of it, we'd probably still be using the full text and students would be paying $150-170 for it.
I'm afraid that the other thing the custom-publishing option does is remove the clout that big institutions have in setting lower textbook prices for smaller ones like mine. Textbook sales reps would never actually laugh in my face, but the threat of taking my business elsewhere fills them with ennui when I have 20-25 students. Small potatoes.
DeleteI found I could never win when it came to textbooks.
ReplyDeleteIf I used them extensively in my courses, there was always someone who complained about it, usually of the form: "If you're always using everything in the course from the book, why do we have to come to lectures when we can skip and read it when it's convenient for us?" Of course, that led to them whining about why their tuition was so high if they could do that--why pay for lectures one wasn't going to or, maybe, didn't have to attend?
But, if I didn't use material from the textbook to the extent that they figured I should, then they figured they paid all that money for nothing.
But, like Sarcastic Bastard said, they had no problem in bringing in expensive coffee or, for that matter, having the latest fancy electronic thingy or wearing the latest designer clothing.
I tried not having a required textbook and the flakes whined about it. The textbook is less than $50 so I feel fine about requiring it.
ReplyDeleteYah. I get the least expensive books I can find, including writing my own material and custom-publishing it at cost. I make it absolutely clear that a fair percentage of the course grade depends on them using the materials I ask them to buy. They still won't buy them.
DeleteOur textbook costs aren't too terrible, and I only ever require one book per course that I teach, or else I go the course pack route. But I always make sure that the library has a copy of absolutely everything that I assign, and every term I file the paperwork to put everything on reserve, and e-reserve if possible (which it usually is). Anyone who *really* needs to cut costs can sit their butt down at the library and do the reading gratis.
ReplyDeleteBut, in the end, Sarcastic Bastard's comment about the $5 lattes absolutely holds here, too.