Textbooks drain pocketbooks

Two hundred dollars can go a long way for a college student, but most have been spending that amount on a single textbook.

The average college student in the United States spends around $1,200 per year on books and supplies, according to The College Board. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that textbook prices have doubled in the past decade, and it is putting a damper on students both financially and academically.

In 2013 the Student Public Interest Research Groups conducted a survey, titled “Fixing the Broken Textbook Market,” of 2,039 students from more than 150 college campuses, they found that 65 percent of students surveyed decided against buying a textbook because of a high price.

According to the survey, “94 percent of students who had foregone purchasing a textbook were concerned that doing so would hurt their grade in a course.”

Madeleine Rademacher, a freshman majoring in pre-pharmacy, said that while she purchased all of her required textbooks for the fall semester, she ended up not using many of them. She wonders whether purchasing the textbooks was worth it, she said.

The fact that not purchasing a textbook could affect her academic performance is worrisome, she said.

“When I started college I knew that the textbooks would be expensive, but I wasn’t expecting them to be as expensive as they are,” Rademacher said.

To tackle this issue, UNM created a committee chaired by Stephen D. Burd, an associate professor for the Anderson School of Management. The Course Materials Committee is aimed at keeping college affordable for students.

“It’s a tough thing to analyze because, if you look at it strictly in terms of dollars and cents, of all the things students spend money on to go to school, textbooks are probably the smallest,” Burd said. “But I would say, in terms of students’ attitudes toward school, the psychological impact of textbooks is probably large in relation to the monetary impact.”

Gauging where textbook costs stand for students rests heavily on knowing which textbooks professors believe suit the needs of their courses best, he said. A single solution to textbook costs may not be plausible, but other schools can be used as models.

“I think it’s important that we not just know how things are at UNM, but we know how things are nationwide, because we may lead or lack,” Burd said.

Open-source textbooks, which are textbooks that are free due to an open copyright license, could be a possible solution once textbook publishing matures, he said. If that is the case, a grant-funded open-source textbook could cover a large percentage of the textbook market for introductory courses.

“We plan to make a recommendation to the Provost by the end of spring with one or more methods by which course material costs — of which textbooks are the biggest component at the moment — might be reduced to students,” Burd said.

Moira Gerety, co-chair of the committee, said watching her own children go through school and struggle with textbook costs is dismaying because the books play an important role in teaching the content of a course.

“Open-source textbooks are one solution simply because they’re just a beginning movement to try to establish a different model,” she said. “However, the amount of open-source textbooks available is fairly small.”

Carrie Mitchell, interim director at the UNM bookstore, said there are many solutions to making textbooks more affordable that are working and many that aren’t. The bookstore has adopted the rental model to help make textbooks more affordable for students, but rentals don’t reduce the financial impact on students as quickly as preferred, she said.

“In my opinion, somewhere we’ve got to come up with an idea that the cost of education includes that textbook, and therefore it’s not just the bookstore and it’s not just a faculty member picking textbooks, it’s everyone involved,” Mitchell said.

More communication between students, staff, the UNM bookstore and textbook publishers would create a better overall relationship when addressing the many ways textbooks costs can be managed, she said.

“At some point we have to figure out what our priority is and how we are going to face this together, and I think the committee is the first time we’ve really faced it,” she said.

Ana Jayme is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.