This morning The Washington Post ran an article (“Swelling textbook costs have college students saying ‘pass’”) reporting that college students are declining to purchase required textbooks due to their cost. This sheds some light on the low academic skills of today’s college students, reported 22 Jan 06:
As students come back to campus and get their spring semester assignments, many will pause in the bookstore and make a choice. They can buy everything on the syllabus — or take a chance.
Sometimes the math is easy: $189.75 for a thick text on principles of management? No thanks.
Textbook prices have been rising at double the rate of inflation for the past two decades, according to a Government Accountability Office study. In Virginia, more than 40 percent of students surveyed by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia said they sometimes just do without.
That’s been increasing, said Jennifer Libertowski of the National Association of College Stores; recently, the group found that nearly 60 percent of students nationwide choose not to buy all the course materials.
For those whose parents are writing $40,000-plus tuition checks every year and covering rent for a D.C. apartment, a few books might not seem like a big deal. But for students working to pay for school or for those whose parents sweat every increase in tuition, book prices can be a nasty surprise …
With so many professors requiring students to buy, unnecessarily, the publications of their colleagues (the scholastic good ol’ boy network of kickbacks), combined with skyrocketing prices (nothing inspires inflation more than captive consumers), it’s no wonder students are foregoing textbooks altogether.
And no wonder their skills are suffering.
January 24, 2006 at 11:09 pm |
Oh, I’m not so sure about the end of your post. I can honestly say that I’ve had classes where we didn’t even crack the book the entire semester. Tests had nothing to do with the book. The lecture was only tangentially related to the book. And don’t even get me started on “secondary” textbooks.
The market is ridiculous for college textbooks, and it’s no wonder students are balking. Especially when a two-year-old book is superseded by a new edition that contains nothing more than an updated copyright date and a couple of shuffled around chapters.
Were I to have the time or the energy, I think I would self-publish a textbook that included workbook style exercises and require students to buy a copy at a reasonable price (say $20 or so). Of course, so much of the cost goes to paying ridiculous “rights” fees to other people for permission to reprint photographs or stories or the like.
What to do? What to do?
January 25, 2006 at 6:32 am |
Ditto that. I’m taking graduate classes now, and rarely need to crack open the books we’re told to buy. Sometimes I do without altogether.
But what I read in The Washington Post suggests that it’s taking less and less for students to declare a textbook unnecessary. Grade inflation (thanks to the model of college = competitive business) seems to ensure that this risk — and the lack of learning it engenders (let’s admit it: I’d learn more if I read the textbooks) — always pays off. Who gets anything less than a B in a college course nowadays? The bell curve has a mighty big head, and no tail to speak of.
January 28, 2006 at 2:35 pm |
Who gets anything less than a B in a college course nowadays? The bell curve has a mighty big head, and no tail to speak of.
I’ve a few students who’d disagree with you on that.
Of course, if a professor fails to use the text, it’s his/her own fault for students not reading it.
January 29, 2006 at 9:22 am |
Good for you, making your students work for their grades!