THE ISSUE: Proposal to lower textbook costs in Mass.
WHAT WE THINK: Legislation good start, more needed
On
Monday, students and lawmakers attended a Joint Committee on Higher
Education hearing, where they discussed a proposal to reduce the rising
cost of college textbooks in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Student
Public Interest Research Group (MASSPIRG) has teamed with State House
Rep. Stephen Walsh to draft a bill that would help to relieve some of
the financial burden on students.
The bill would force
publishers to provide a comprehensive list of their books, their
wholesale prices, and the projected release dates of new editions. The
bill would also ban "bundling" - the practice of selling textbooks
packaged with additional workbooks, CDs, and other material that, if
opened, can prevent resale.
This proposal is noble in its
intent, if a bit limited. The bulk of the responsibility falls in the
hands of campus bookstores, where the majority of students buy books at
hiked-up prices.
MASSPIRG asserted that the cost of textbooks
has risen nearly four times the rate of inflation over the past 10
years, attributing this to practices such as bundling and releasing
barely improved, yet more expensive, editions of existing texts.
The
Boston College Bookstore is filled with textbooks crammed with
supplementary "learning aids" that your professor will tell you to
discard - not to mention the books encased in a thin layer of
cellophane that determines whether your book is worth its full price or
pocket change. Yet, because the Bookstore declines to release the ISBN
numbers of its textbooks through its Web site, students find it
difficult to buy texts online before the semester starts.
Walsh's
bill would be very beneficial since it would force publishers to sell
these materials independently and leave the students with the
opportunity to decide its importance.
The fact remains that
the on-campus bookstores hold the cards in this issue. With the cost of
books so high, totaling almost 20 percent of tuition at an average
university and 50 percent of tuition at a community college, MASSPIRG
states that these bookstores should make an effort to help students by
selling books closer to their wholesale prices.
Though it's
counterintuitive for the Bookstore to help students buy their texts
elsewhere, more can be done to reduce unnecessary purchases.
