In many parts of the country, tomorrow is the first day of class at many universities. I thought this might make for an interesting diary in which people could talk about their pet peeves from their days in college. It also gives me a chance to write about the racket that is college textbooks & university bookstores, as well as the problems of parking at a major institution of learning.
By some estimates, college textbook prices are up 186% from 1986. After a student spends an exorbitant sum for books, at the end of the semester, the very same bookstore will only buy them back for a fraction of what they charged, if they'll buy them back at all, since a new edition of "World History" will be needed next semester. Unless Doc & Marty got in the DeLorean, traveled back to ancient Greece & screwed up the space-time continuum, I don't think much has changed about the Peloponnesian War.
And if universities can't squeeze blood from a turnip at the bookstore, they'll do it in the parking lots.
I thought this would be an interesting topic to talk about, since the time is getting near for fall terms to start. College tuition costs have been rising, but another element to the whole equation are the books. This is an issue that drives me nuts because of how wrong it is on so many levels. How many people are scraping by working long hours at shitty part-time jobs, taking out student loans, trying their best to better themselves by getting a good education, only to be screwed over by state-funded institutions in bed with publishers selling books for twice the price they sell them overseas? And the students can't buy a used copy of a 2 or 3-year-old book, because the powers that be decided they will be using the publisher's "new edition", which is no different in content other than changes to the foreword, new pictures & bar graphs, or renumbering the bloody pages in some cases. I wonder how many forests have been cut down printing College Algebra textbooks over & over again, with miniscule changes? Or how many books have been bundled with CDs, DVDs, workbooks, or other nonsense that will never be used in conjunction with the course, and are only tacked on to justify an inflated price?
Once the redundant new editions get to the bookstores, they get an average markup of 25% over the retail price. According to a 2008 survey by the National Association of College Stores (NACS), the average American student pays $700 per year on required course materials. It's been estimated that a full-time student at a four year public school in California now pays on average over a thousand dollars per year just on textbooks.
Here's a story from last year about textbook prices at West Virginia University.
The book required for German 101 was priced at $207 for a new copy.
The price for a new copy of the book required for German 204, however, was only $185. Spanish 101 and 204 books were priced at just $66 and $112, respectively.
Other big-ticket textbooks included Physics 102, which is going for $225 for a new copy. And as if organic chemistry didn't already have a reputation for being one of the hardest classes any university offers, studying it will cost students $310, nearly as much as it costs for an in-state student to take just that one class. The biggest-ticket item, however, was the book required for Nursing 255, ringing in at $400.
What really annoys students is that they are lucky to regain a third of what they paid when selling a textbook. Then they see the same books on the shelves at huge markups the next semester.
The Koch Report for the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance (an independent committee which reports to Congress & the Department of Education) found similarities between the market for textbook prices & health-care costs.
The textbook market is remarkable because the primary individuals who choose college textbooks (faculty) are not the people that pay for those textbooks (students). Only a few other organized markets in the United States are similar in this regard. A comparable situation exists in medicine where doctors prescribe drugs for their patients, but do not pay for those drugs.
Analogous to the market for prescription drugs where prices have risen rapidly, in the market for textbooks the separation of textbook choice and textbook payment profoundly influences pricing. Albeit for primarily good purpose, students end up being coerced to pay for someone else’s choices. This tends to make their textbook purchases less responsive to price increases than their purchases of items such as cheeseburgers and jeans.
Long-standing academic custom assigns faculty the right to choose the textbooks and other course materials that are required or recommended for their courses. Sometimes a collective group of faculty will make that decision. For example, the faculty of an institution’s Department of History might jointly choose the textbook for an introductory American History course. More than 90 percent of the time, however, individual faculty make their textbook choices independently, and often with little regard to the cost of the textbooks, because they are not the individuals who pay for them.
Also.....
- "Price Inelastic" - The price elasticity of demand for textbooks has been measured to be as low as -.2, which means that a ten percent increase in textbook prices will cause only a two percent decline in the number of textbooks purchased, which is not surprising seeing that students are something of a captive consumer market with limited choices.
- Financial Aid - As prices go up, so does the financial aid.
The result is that colleges and the federal government tend to facilitate textbook price increases by injecting additional need-based financial aid after textbook prices have increased. It’s worth noting that a roughly analogous situation exists in some medical care markets where rapid medical care price increases have been validated by insurance coverage that expands to meet the price increases. The effect in both cases (textbooks and medicine) is to encourage even more rapid price increases.
Obama veered onto the topic as he was finishing a roundtable on college affordability today with students at the University of Texas-Pan American, a state school near the Mexican border with a student body that includes many Latinos from financially struggling families. Noting the enormous cost of textbooks, Obama called the practice "a big scam."
"Books are a big scam," Obama said. "I taught law at the University of Chicago for 10 years, and one of the biggest scams is law professors write their own text books and then assign it to their students."
"They make a mint. It’s a huge racket," he added.
- Pushing A New Edition - Since the book publishers make most of their sales during the first couple of years after publication, they create new editions, and then push the used books out of the market.
In this respect, textbook markets are similar to many durable goods markets (automobiles and electronics provide examples) in which sellers periodically offer for sale new versions of their products. In such situations, these sellers end up in competition with themselves as both new and used versions of their products are bought and sold.
The difference here is that the textbook publishers and the bookstores together have a much greater ability to remove the older versions of textbooks from circulation. By contrast, the Ford Motor Company cannot wipe out used car markets. Textbook producers, however, in conjunction with the textbook wholesalers and bookstores, have a substantial ability to eliminate competition from previous editions of their textbooks.
- The University's Financial Stake In The Bookstore - "With a few exceptions... institutions of higher education either own and operate their own bookstores, or they contract that responsibility to an external vendor such as Follett or Barnes and Noble, in which case they usually receive a lump-sum payment plus a percentage of dollar value of sales at contracted on-campus stores."
However, there are some
options that might be having some effect (
at least in Maryland).
University bookstores are having to adapt to stay competitive. The bookstore at Towson University, for instance, revamped its price list after losing $500,000 in sales last year. There are more used books on the shelves as the bookstore works more closely with professors on deciding what books will be used for classes. The bookstore is considering renting out books.
The College of Southern Maryland tested a rental program of its own last year and expanded it because it was successful.
In the meantime, an Internet movement is slowly growing to help students beat the rising costs of textbooks. The latest is in the proliferation of sites that rent books. Chegg.com rents out textbooks at a savings of 65 percent to 85 percent of what it would cost to buy new.
"The textbook problem has existed for students for a long time," said Jim Safka, CEO of Chegg.com. "The difference is when I was in school, there was no Internet and no other alternatives to buy books."
And now to parking.....
At my beloved Alma mater, the University's parking enforcement on their Schwinns & glorified golf carts were always circling like vultures to find some violation in order to have a ticket writing party. The usual problem was the limited amount of free student parking. The main parking lot on the southern end of the campus has students crossing a railroad track, with some playing chicken with a train from time to time to avoid being late to class. The main parking lot on the northern end of campus has students crossing a major four lane street, with stories about hit pedestrians sometimes ending up in the student newspaper.
The University's solution to this problem was to build "pay to park" parking garages. So at the beginning of every semester, the same thing happens. The free student parking lots are packed & stacked, and people "find" parking spaces that aren't really parking spaces (parking on the grass edges of the parking lots). Not everyone can afford to pay for a parking garage every day after being mugged at the student bookstore for a $150 chemistry book.
What made it even worse was the University has premium lots, with great access to the main buildings. Every year, I would go to the parking office & request a spot, and be told that faculty had bought up all the spaces. However, every time I would drive past the lot, it was always half empty.