Professors should consult students to pick textbooks

I’m going to say something that will surprise no one: textbooks are really, really expensive.

It doesn’t really matter the subject, any class that doesn’t defer to books in public domain or a popular press will likely see mind-numbing prices.

According to NBC, the cost of textbooks has risen at more that four times the cost of inflation. To say the least, that’s an alarming problem from the perspective of a group of people who are largely living by accumulating debt. So why is this happening?

Part of the problem is that students don’t really have a choice. Whatever the textbook is, there’s only one book, only one current version, and so there are really only four options as displayed by the bookstore, Amazon, or any other place one might find textbooks: buy new, buy used, rent new and rent used. Regardless, there’s initially only one stem for a book, the publisher.

Students need books. If a professor requires a book, the class most likely needs to buy the book without asking too many questions. Personally, I’ve had classes where professors insist that I need to get the book and then never open it. That’s another $80 I’ll have to pay once I graduate.

And as much as my professors would probably hate to see me write this, you can probably get away with not reading at least some assigned material, and save a few bucks that way. This grants at least a small amount of choice to hold off a purchase until there’s true necessity.

Even if we can claim a small amount of power from this minor rebellion, students really don’t have much choice in what books we need. I think that’s the real problem. A Planet Money NPR report addressed this issue. On that particular episode, a professor and a textbook company CEO who discussed the process professors undergo to select textbooks, something the average student doesn’t really get to see all that well.

There’s a whole marketing industry based around selling professors the newest and best textbooks. In come cases, the professor assigns a book they wrote and thus stand to make a profit.

At least in the case of most professors contacted by NPR, professors weren’t aware of the exact cost of the materials being sold to them. The problem is that they were the ones being marketed to, but they aren’t the ones with a wallet in the market.

As the only supplier, textbook companies decide the initial price, and everything falls in line from there. In most products, the free market will allow for competition to either drive down price or increase quality.

There aren’t options that would make that work in a free market, and no great incentive for the government to regulate this. Maybe the most expensive textbooks are really the best, but from the perspective of a student, this might not be worth the extra cost. Especially given the rise of free and open source textbooks that still undergo review by professors around the country from multiple outlets on an array of subjects, it seems much less likely that we really are getting hundreds of dollars more in value.

All I’m saying is if professors and students alike joined arms, we might be able to bring about meaningful positive change for academia, or at least save some money so I can occasionally afford to eat something besides instant mac-n-cheese.

Smith is a member of College Democrats and the Political Science League.