Higher Education In The News

By Rep. Kevin Murphy and Saffron Zomer

It's September, and a new generation of college students is on its way to classes. To get there, they've already negotiated a maze of admissions requirements, course selection and financing decisions. After figuring out how they will finance their college degree, there is still one more sticker shock for this year's college freshman (and their later-year colleagues) -- the cost of textbooks. The average college student spends about $900 on textbooks each year. For an average full-time Massachusetts community college student, that's about 30 percent of tuition and fees, and a difficult sum to come up with at the start of semester. The high cost of textbooks can lead to difficult choices: doing without a book at the expense of grades, choosing not to take some courses with very expensive texts, or maxing out a credit card at the bookstore and worrying about mounting debt later.

Not only are textbook prices high -- they're rising. Textbook prices have skyrocketed at four times the rate of inflation over the last decade. The driving force behind this rapid price escalation is a set of unfair business practices textbook publishers engage in. For example, freshmen taking introductory calculus this semester may well have trouble finding a used edition of their textbook, because a new edition just came out -- and obviously not because the subject matter changed; it hasn't for decades. New editions, which are issued routinely by publishers, drive up the cost of textbooks and make it difficult for students to find cheaper used copies. While some new editions are obviously justified, the majority of the professors surveyed by MASSPIRG thought that new editions in their fields were justified only "sometimes" or "rarely," hardly an endorsement of their educational value.

Another publishing tactic that drives up prices is the "bundling" of books with additional materials such as CD-ROMS, work books and study guides. In some cases, these materials are legitimate learning tools. Courses such as music or languages in particular make extensive use of bundled materials. However too often students don't even take the plastic off their CDs, and then find they cannot resell the book because a component of the "bundle" was lost or damaged. The faculty isn't enthusiastic either: 65 percent of professors surveyed by MASSPIRG reported using the additional materials "rarely or never" compared with 24 percent who do "always or usually."

The professors at our colleges and universities do care deeply about both their students' academic success and the dire financial straits that many of them are in. However, they can't make the right choices for their students if they don't have the options and the information they need. Seventy-five percent of professors report that publishers' representatives do not disclose price information to them during sales meetings. Furthermore, low-cost or no-frills options of texts, if any, are often unavailable or hard to find.

"Textbooks" as we currently understand them may well become moot 10 years from now, as more and more knowledge moves onto the Internet and the nature of publishing changes. However, in the meantime, our students deserve a better deal: They're investing more in their education than any generation of students before them, and they are the lifeblood of our economy and the future of our state.

There is currently legislation filed in Massachusetts by Rep. Steve Walsh that would require publishers to disclose price information to faculty and require that any bundled book also be available "a la carte." This is a step in the right direction -- giving faculty better choices and better information can only lead to better outcomes for students. In the meantime, if you're a freshman suffering from sticker shock, or a later-year student struggling to stay in school, visit maketextbooksaffordable.com to learn more about how you can help make textbook prices fairer for next year's college students when they make their first trip to the bookstore.

State Rep. Kevin J. Murphy, D-Lowell, is House chairman of the Joint Committee on Higher Education. Saffron Zomer is the Student Chapters Program director for MASSPIRG, a statewide non-profit public interest organization.