Here’s
another thing we need to consider as we struggle to reduce the godawful high
price of a college education:
Textbooks
are too expensive and too expendable.
For
starters, the National Association of College Stores reports that the average
textbook cost $68 in 2012. The College Board recommends that students budget up
to $1,328 per year for books and supplies (by the way, for community college
students, that could be almost half as much as what they spend on tuition!).
Here’s
a kicker: college textbook prices have jumped 812 per cent since 1978.
I’ve
been looking at textbooks, as an MBA student and as an adjunct professor, for
the last 25 years, and I’m thinking textbooks didn’t get 812 per cent better
since 1978.
Here’s
another kicker: in my experience, most students don’t really use the textbooks
much, and I defy anyone to prove that most students do the required reading. I
think a typical student buys the book because the instructor says it’s required
in a slightly “Make my day!” kind of voice.
And
here’s another kicker: colleges and professors share the blame for the
galloping cost of books. College book stores typically are profit centers.
Textbook publishers for years have been adding “features” to textbooks that
make the instructor’s job easier: a typical instructor’s version of a text includes a CD or online component with graphic
materials, PowerPoint slides, detailed discussion guides with questions and
lengthy text responses, and high-tech test materials and question/answer banks.
Publishers in general are offering a measurable amount of the materials that
professors prepared all by themselves in the old days.
Let’s
face it. The folks who benefit most from college textbooks are the folks who
sell them and the folks who make them a course requirement.
Copyright © Richard
Carl Subber 2015
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