High Textbook Prices

College tuition is a subject that I am certain is on every college student's mind. The current cost of college has become so outrageously high and so students are graduating college with what you think is a feeling of excitement for their lives starting, when in reality they are entering a pool of stress due to high amounts of debt and no job guarantees. With that being said overly expensive College Tuition is merely taking away opportunities from potential students. According to Collegefactual.com, you will see that 20 years ago the average college tuition for a student at any University was around $6,285 for the room, board, and tuition. Today, according to Niche.com, the average tuition for almost any college is over $30,000 for those same things. Today, this isn't even offered for those same colleges, we don’t even know what is actually causing the raising tuition. At this point in time, we are paying for the name. Just like clothing, we pay more for the “high end” (a.k.a the college name) items. This is an issue that not only affects college students, but people who want a good education. College tuition should be lowered because the average student debt is too high, FAFSA results can be misleading and not high enough, and there is not enough access to college for deserving students.

`One reason college textbooks should be free is because how expensive they are. The price of a college textbook can start at a hundred dollars. Most students are required to have a few textbooks each semester. So the prices of each textbook will add up and may cost over a few hundred

One of the main reasons why college textbooks are so expensive is because they are overpriced. The publishers set the prices. The bookstore has no control. The publishers of the textbooks are in the habit of bringing new editions quite frequently. Most students hesitate to buy old editions fearing that they will miss out on

Rise in tuition is often seen as a school trying to gauge as much as money as they can from the students. A view most forgotten in this argument is that of the school. The school has to have money to feed the students and house the students plus teach them. Those three things are a necessity for the students. Schools would face lawsuit after lawsuit if they failed to feed the students. The school also has to pay its employees and hire new ones that leave.

Attention-getter: How much money have you spent just this year alone on college? Hold on now, did you include all the fees? Living expenses? Your meal plan? Obvioulsy the answer is going to be in the upwards of thousands of dollars. Depressing, I know! College should be a time where you are truly discovering who you are and what you want to do with your life. It shouldn’t be about how you’re slowly but surely giving your life away to student loans. Oh yes, student loans, the mortal enemy of any college student. The college tuition alone is already high enough to put you in debt with student loans for a majority of your life. There are many things that factor into the price of a college education, some reasonable, others however, are a different story. Today, I want to talk to you about the scam that is going on concerning the price of college textbooks. An interesting statistic by The Huffington Post tells us that the cost of college textbooks has increased 253% faster than the cost of college tuition over the decade. How come college textbooks are so expensive? And what can we do to stop this? Well let’s get into it shall we.

I. ATTENTION GETTER: Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School mentioned in The New York Times how textbooks and school supplies account to 26% of all student fees in State Universities and in Junior colleges it is about a 72%. Just how much money do we have to put in textbooks in order to get an education.

In the article, The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much by Paul Campos (2015) explains the motives why college tuition rose so much over the last decades. In the years where baby boomers went to post-secondary education they had summer occupations to be able to afford college, but after a few decades, the funding that was open to the public for institutions were reduced. Consequently, cuts were in-forced, the forms of higher education have been rising year after year. Furthermore, over the last twenty years more people have been going to college, for example, since 1995, the number of scholars that have enrolled in graduate and undergraduate curriculums have amplified by approximately fifty percent. Also, the earnings of professors have

According to TED; The Economics Daily, tuition and fees increase 63% since January of 2006. Some people believe that the cost of college tuition is acceptable. However, college tuition cost is too high. They ought to be lowered and made affordable to all. College tuition cost is too high, a high tuition can prevent some students from receiving college education, forces some to take out loans, and ultimately can cause future financial instability.

The cost of college books has tripled in the last 10 years, costing an average of $200 dollars (NIA). College 's will publish their own books, require students to buy them, then update or revise them every year to make the book obsolete causing students to have to by new one 's every year and making the resale of them, nonexistent! College 's will work with publishers and recieve kick backs for using books they publish. Adminstation for college also feel the advantage of higher tuition rates. The president of Yale salary has tripled from $591,709 in 2000, to 1.63 million in 2009.(5) With the average cost of graduating at a 4 year college at $27,293 a year, it is easy to see who is truly profitting from an attending and/or graduated student. Colleges are captializing of students in a poor economy and once out of college, their is no guarentee employment will be waiting.

According to an article titled (“College textbook costs more outrageous than ever” from today.com by Herb Weisbaum), the College Board “estimates that the average student in this country now spends around $1,200 a year on books and supplies. A single book can cost as much as $200”.

“Marketing Professors’ Perspectives on the Cost of College Textbooks: A Pilot Study” is a paper by Lawrence S. Silver, Robert E. Stevens of Southeastern Oklahoma State University and Kenneth E. Clow of University of Louisiana. It was published in the Journal of Education for Business Volume 87. The first half of the paper starts off by explaining why the cost of textbooks is an issue. They go on to explain different competitors’ textbook have in the marketplace today and how publishers are trying to appeal new customers through professors. The second half of the paper focuses on a study that was done by surveying random marketing professors in the United States. The survey contained questions asking about the pricing of textbooks and how they

The topic of college tuition is one you can hear almost anywhere you go. The cost of college is definitely on a steady rise. With the rise in the price of college the demand of college graduates in the work force is also on the rise. It is known fact that the higher you go in your college education the better job you can come out in the end with; but with a longer education is longer payments.

Ethan Senack, a higher education associate at U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group), wrote in his article titled, “Fixing The Broken Textbook Market: How Students Respond To High Textbook Cost And Demand Alternatives.” Whereas, he suggest that the problems associated with high pricing on textbooks, has nothing to do with the student. However, he feels that the students would be the most effective in seeking lower prices for textbooks. He gave several examples of colleges that are overcoming this barrier. One successful example he used was Maryland Open-Source Textbook (MOST). The university staff, professors and students worked together to generate ideas to reduce the cost of textbooks, using the use of open textbooks (16).

Inconvenient Truth #1: High Costs By any measure, American colleges are expensive and growing more so all the time. Tuition fees have risen at well over double the rate of inflation, and adjusting for inflation, tuition charges are over double what they were a generation ago (see Figure 1). Indeed, tuition fees are rising faster than family incomes. While it is possible for the price of something to rise indefinitely even adjusting for overall inflation—witness the price of tickets to Shakespeare’s plays in London, which no doubt has been rising for 400 years—price increases greater than income are not indefinitely sustainable.

People have seen and despise the prices for used and brand new textbooks. There are many websites, stores, and companies that sell textbooks at a biased price. The books being sold are variety to depend on the dealer rather than optimizing to society’s opinion, costs must be decided depending on the quality of the textbook.