Are students held captive by rising textbook prices? How to cut the cost.
According to a review of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data by NBC, textbook prices have risen by 1,041 percent since 1977.
Textbook prices have risen by 1,041 percent since 1977 according to of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data.聽 suggested that college students budget anywhere between $1,200 and $1,350 for books and supplies in the 2014-2015 school year.
There鈥檚 no denying that textbooks are expensive. What can college students do to cut costs?
Nicole Allen, a spokeswoman for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources, that students are trapped in a vicious cycle.
鈥淭hey鈥檝e been able to keep raising prices because students are 鈥榗aptive consumers.鈥� They have to buy whatever books they鈥檙e assigned," she said.
confirms that college textbook prices have been rising, but they point out another phenomenon 鈥� student spending has stayed relatively the same since 2002. That means the students may not be so captive after all.
As the NPR report points out, students are obtaining textbooks in increasingly diverse ways. The spread of the Internet has made it possible to rent textbooks, buy them used off a third-party site, or use social media to connect with a student trying to sell theirs.
Surprisingly, tech-savvy millennials seem to prefer print textbooks to e-books even as the Internet has become more readily available. found that students spent an average of $320 for the semester to get 5.3 textbooks, 87 percent of which were print books.
One student quoted in the Post story said that complex texts like "Democracy in America" by Alexis de Tocqueville are more easily digested when read in print format. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 imagine reading Tocqueville or understanding him electronically,鈥� the student said. 鈥淭hat would just be awful.鈥�
Don Kilburn, North American president for Pearson, the largest publisher in the world, 聽that the move to digital 鈥渄oesn鈥檛 look like a revolution right now. It looks like an evolution, and it鈥檚 lumpy at best.鈥�
Instead, students use sites like Amazon and to find used print books and buy or rent them for discounted prices.
But even then, students often still find themselves in a financial twist. said that more students were buying than renting. One college student told the Times, 鈥渨ith buying, you may get some money back.鈥� Not the case with renting. But when students purchase books they can potentially sell them to someone and get some money back.
For students comfortable with digital texts, suggests another option.
鈥淥pen-source textbooks are created under an open license, so they can be downloaded free or printed at low cost; instructors can even rearrange the sequence of material, to suit their preference. There鈥檚 a movement to make faculty-written, peer-reviewed open-source textbooks available to professors and students, to help keep a lid on the cost of textbooks.鈥�
, the biggest group of adopters of online education resources are community colleges, which tend to have some of the highest books and supplies rates.
gives several tips for obtaining college textbooks:
- Compare prices at your college bookstore and online
- If you鈥檙e short on cash, renting is probably the best option upfront
- If you tend to be careless, think twice about renting
- Always double-check the ISBN before purchasing