COLUMN: Buried by books
Three hundred dollars worth of textbooks each semester might seem like merely a drop in the bucket of college debt. However, it's safe to say that paying nearly $400 per credit hour for the past four years has left my bucket pretty full.
I am swimming in so much debt that it is funny to talk about with friends, many of whom are in a similar situation.
I feel it is imperative to keep a good sense of humor when you are getting ripped off that badly. Over the course of my college career, I have spent somewhere around $4,000 on textbooks.
Putting it into perspective makes it a lot harder to laugh off.
Nothing highlights my financial plight better than the back-to-school bookstore trip I make each semester. Since freshman year, I have been swallowing my pride and buying overpriced, rarely-used textbooks. And I have swallowed my words at the end of each semester when they offer to give me a fraction of what I paid for the book.
Do I really have a choice? Is it worth my education to refuse to pay these ridiculous prices each semester?
Last week, I saw a glimmer of hope in the syllabus of one of my classes. We would be using an electronic copy of the textbook to “save money.” A $100 piece of cardboard with an access code for a book determined that was a lie.
But I should have known better, considering the cost of textbooks has inflated 812 percent since 1978 and will likely continue to rise, according to the American Enterprise Institute. There seems to be no easy way around what I consider to be the biggest rip-off in the country.
But that’s assuming students and teachers keep the publishers in business.
Many teachers pursue the most affordable materials to alleviate students’ financial struggles, while many students look to web retailers like Amazon for better deals on books. Last spring, for example, 34 percent of students said they downloaded course material from an authorized website, according to a survey by the Book Industry Study Group.
I fear that if the rising price of tuition and the bleak outlook on the job market do not immediately scare students away, other expenses will do the trick. But when does spending so much money stop making sense?
Although there is never a neat solution, we need to understand the textbook industry in order to combat growing costs.
Big publishing companies like Prentice Hall constantly promote their products to teachers. After instructors choose a book, the stores stock their shelves and sell them to students at a marked-up price – anywhere from 20 to 25 percent more than what the publisher charged, according to CMU Bookstore Director Barry Waters.
When selling these books back, the CMU Bookstore offers students only 50 percent of the new price, Waters said. But if the store already has the necessary number of copies or the teacher switches to a different text, the book might not be worth the paper it’s written on.
In 2008, Congress passed a law forcing publishers to give teachers more information about the price of materials.
That same law requires colleges to post information about required textbooks so students can prepare for purchase. If students want to save money, they need to check the Registrar’s site for textbook titles, then shop around to find the best deal – often online.
Of course, you are not obligated to do this. You might not think you owe it to yourself to save money, but complacency keeps questionable systems intact. Some people do not have the money to pay the outrageous prices. Some simply have too much pride.
A drop in the bucket for you could be somebody else’s deluge.
