This week’s topic is one that is sure to raise groans on a college campus: the issue of textbook pricing. I’m sure everyone who has gone through college has been forced to buy an egregiously priced stack of paper just for one class. The reason for all of these overpriced books lies at the center of this controversy: the textbook publishing industry. 80% of the textbook industry is controlled by just 5 textbook companies. It’s no wonder that the prices of some books are outrageous. For example, a new copy of the Calculus textbook used at Penn State stands at $220.
The lack of publishers is a serious issue for higher education. There’s a lack of competition, and that is enabling companies like Pearson, Cengage and McGraw-Hill to charge what they do. Another major reason textbooks prices have risen 67% from 2008 to 2018 is due to an unintended effect of technology. Digital textbooks and online course subscriptions have played an insidious role in raising prices. Because digital textbooks and course packages are normally temporary subscriptions, they have no resale value. Furthermore, because the digital copy is normally from some online portal, not a PDF you can download or distribute or keep afterwards, there is even less resale value. When a product cannot be resold, it effectively becomes more expensive because it removes the option of recuperating some of your losses by reselling it. Even worse, because the resale option is gone, the chance of a student finding a cheaper used book somewhere online is also gone. That means to the student who needs a book for a class, they will have to buy it at some ridiculous price at the only available location: the publisher’s online portal, like this one.
I am irked by the cost of textbooks, but I suppose that is just a side effect of the structure of the publishing industry and of new technology. What I find fault in most is mandatory online courseware that is locked behind a paywall. This occurs when classes use online homework or quizzes that are weighted as a certain percentage of your final grade. If you don’t want to shell out $100 for a semester’s subscription to an online course package, you aren’t getting 20% of your grade. I have had this experience happen in multiple courses already. My introduction to computer programming course used online homework that was 5% of the final grade — it cost $80. This semester my business statistics course has online quizzes that are worth 15% of the grade — at the cost of $100. I wish there was a better way, not only for the student but for the professor and TAs’ workload, to assign homework and quizzes without digging into the wallets of students.
Maybe no homework or quizzes is the solution. In all seriousness though, optional homework from a free set of questions would be cheaper. But that is another topic to be covered.
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