Assessing the price inflation of college textbooks

There is a high likelihood that St. Joe’s is robbing you right now or has robbed you in the last two weeks. Did you buy your textbooks from the bookstore? Did those books put a huge dent in your bank account? If yes, then you’ve been robbed like millions of other college students in the U.S. who buy books from their college bookstores.

According to NBC, the prices of college textbooks “[have] risen over three times the rate of [economic] inflation from January 1977 to June 2015, a 1,041 percent increase.” Textbook prices at the St. Joe’s Bookstore are outrageous.

This week, I was forced to pay almost $200 for a textbook for one of my classes, because the professor apparently had the publishers of the book “compile specific chapters and practice problems into one book,” just for her class. What’s the problem with using last year’s edition and manually turning the pages to these specific chapters and problems?

Increasing efforts to digitize schoolwork is making books even more expensive. Purchasing a one-time, one semester access code for McGraw-Hill’s “Connect,” an online program where students can complete problems and practice questions for homework, can run students up to $200. The access code is the kiss of death for a class: if an access code is required, students have no choice other than to purchase the expensive code to maintain their grades.

Once the semester is over, the online practice problems and materials expire and become inaccessible. I’d much rather spend my salary from working over winter break on concert tickets than an online textbook that I’ll never use and that expires in May.

Scholarships don’t usually cover textbook costs, either, so students (or their parents) end up paying out of pocket for books. It would be easy for professors to simply require the previous edition of a book for class, or for them to spend the extra 15 minutes and find an open-source textbook and put the link in the syllabus for students to access.

So where is all of this textbook money going? According to The Oregonian, textbook royalties are usually around 15% or higher for best-selling authors. Gregory Mankiw, author of the $280 “Principles of Economics” textbook has earned royalties that “on this book alone may exceed $42 million, supplemented by revenues from several other textbooks.” We can assume that a portion of sales go to the publisher, and that the remainder goes to the university selling the books.

The infrastructure of schools like St. Joe’s would not collapse if they moved to open- source or other cheaper textbook options.

It’s already beginning at some schools: in December, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis began a program that will recognize and reward professors and programs that use only open-source textbooks and course materials that can be accessed for free. The University of the Cumberlands, a small private university in Williamsburg, Kentucky, announced in September that starting next fall, they will begin offering a free, opt-in textbook loan program. Students who choose to participate in the program can get their books for free as long as they return them at the end of the semester and can purchase them if they choose to.

Schools should begin encouraging professors to use older editions of their textbooks and even open-source versions in their courses. This semester, I got cheaper books wherever possible: I found a few free PDFs and one e-book for $25, but still had to pay $140 for one book.

I’m hoping professors and St. Joe’s in general will consider that textbooks are out of pocket costs for students. Universities are already saddling us with student loans for the rest of our lives, so they should at least let us save a few hundred dollars each semester to spend on fun stuff, not an access code.