2008 Woodie Awards
Rise up, demand fair textbook policies
Jim Elliott
Issue date: 2/15/08 Section: Opinion
Originally published: 2/14/08 at 7:06 PM EST
Last update: 2/14/08 at 7:05 PM EST
As a poor college student preparing for a career as an underpaid journalist, I've pretty much resigned myself to a lifetime of budgets and working to make ends meet. Being kind of poor is not so bad really, although it makes you very wary of getting ripped off. Speaking of getting ripped off: how much did you pay for textbooks this semester?
Even if your financial status isn't as delicate as mine, I'm sure you can sympathize with my helpless outrage when it comes time to buy textbooks. The fact is that textbooks have become outrageously expensive across the board. According to a study done by the Government Accountability Office, textbook prices have grown at twice the annual inflation rate over the last two decades!
The result of such an inflation rate is, as Jerry Decelle, the director of the Campus Bookstore once told me, that "you might as well just count on paying $450 to $500 for books every semester." That's well over a month's rent for me, not to mention almost a quarter of SUNY Plattsburgh's in-state tuition per semester.
So who is responsible for the high cost of textbooks? While researching this topic for a news writing class I initially suspected that the college bookstore was to blame, but it turned out that's not the case. The bookstore only marks up textbooks about 25 percent, which is standard and actually does not make the store much of a profit.
So who is really to blame: as I found out, textbook publishers, underdeveloped school textbook policies and professors.
Textbook publishers have increased the rate of "new editions" being cycled into curriculums from roughly every three or four years to around every 18 months. This means there are fewer of the cheaper used textbooks available and that the bookstore will buy back fewer textbooks because less are being reused.
I understand the introduction of textbooks might be necessary for courses covering rapidly changing topics like science and technology, but I'd like to know what significant developments there have been in introductory statistics to justify a new edition of a textbook in the last 10 years.
Even if your financial status isn't as delicate as mine, I'm sure you can sympathize with my helpless outrage when it comes time to buy textbooks. The fact is that textbooks have become outrageously expensive across the board. According to a study done by the Government Accountability Office, textbook prices have grown at twice the annual inflation rate over the last two decades!
The result of such an inflation rate is, as Jerry Decelle, the director of the Campus Bookstore once told me, that "you might as well just count on paying $450 to $500 for books every semester." That's well over a month's rent for me, not to mention almost a quarter of SUNY Plattsburgh's in-state tuition per semester.
So who is responsible for the high cost of textbooks? While researching this topic for a news writing class I initially suspected that the college bookstore was to blame, but it turned out that's not the case. The bookstore only marks up textbooks about 25 percent, which is standard and actually does not make the store much of a profit.
So who is really to blame: as I found out, textbook publishers, underdeveloped school textbook policies and professors.
Textbook publishers have increased the rate of "new editions" being cycled into curriculums from roughly every three or four years to around every 18 months. This means there are fewer of the cheaper used textbooks available and that the bookstore will buy back fewer textbooks because less are being reused.
I understand the introduction of textbooks might be necessary for courses covering rapidly changing topics like science and technology, but I'd like to know what significant developments there have been in introductory statistics to justify a new edition of a textbook in the last 10 years.
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