Increasing Rate of Textbook Prices
According to Gail Bucker of Fox News in an article titled, “Hitting the Wall on Textbooks,” students are avoiding the cost of textbooks by either not purchasing them or dropping classes. Tuition has been rising increasingly over the last twenty years. The dramatic increase in our tuition dollars leads Congress to conduct a study on the cost of textbooks. They found in an 18 year span, “Textbook prices nearly tripled, increasing an average of 6 percent per a year - twice the rate of inflation…” The article also stated that it is not strange for students to spend approximately $1000 on textbooks in their upper-class years.
Are textbooks really worth the price? The article found that some students have admitted to not buying textbooks at all, dropping classes, or avoiding taking a class because of the textbook cost. Half.com and Amazon.com represent some of the ways students are finding to get their money’s worth in textbooks. In addition, some Universities are realizing the impact on their students and have started a textbook rental service. Is tuition going to keep climbing along with textbook prices?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,168919,00.html
1 comment:
Textbook prices are high as a result of the publishers' greedy ideals, in my mind. Many times, there are a number of ways to make a textbook less expensive that go unutilized and, instead, publishers print on the highest quality papers with the best bindings and full blown color diagrams. Do we, as students, need a diagram with eleven colors, and do these textbooks need to be built to hold up for 30 or 40 years? New textbook editions seem to be released every four or five years on the college level, so why must the content be overpriced because publishers wish to have their books survive a nuclear holocast? I find that textbooks are being made almost obsolete due to digital content being utilized, in systems such as APLIA, for far less to create, maintain, and update as a textbook in production, so why must publishers build a textbook like a tank and charge us a hundred dollars a pop for something that many of us will end up getting rid of in half a year anyway?
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