Colleges cost enough already, without books

It’s enough to crease a Baby Boomer’s brow.

Mike Bjur, a retired educator from Ridgefield, Wash., has nearly finished making tuition payments for his four children. His youngest, Jeff Bjur, is spending his senior year studying public relations at Eastern Washington University.

But neither father nor son can quite shake the sticker shock of college textbook prices.

“The cost of his textbooks for one quarter exceeded what the cost of tuition was when I went to Central Washington University (in 1967),” Bjur says. The dad’s tuition was $285; his son’s textbooks $350.

At the start of every quarter, students and parents brace themselves for the high costs they’ll find in campus bookstores, where a single physics or calculus text can run $125. Yet it’s this time of year, when students sell their used books back just before Christmas, often for far less than they paid, that you hear the loudest squawks on college campuses. A complicated textbook publishing industry in search of profits, along with wholesalers making money off used texts and self-supporting campus bookstores, leave American college students feeling squeezed.

Tim McLean ran for student body president at Spokane Community College on a platform that included starting an online student book-swapping site to avoid a bookstore buyback.

“I personally think it’s a rip-off,” McLean says. “Most of the time you might get $10 to $15 back for a $100 book.”

Bookstore managers explain they have limits on the deals they can strike during buyback week. If the course won’t be offered next quarter, or the instructor has chosen a new text, they won’t have shoppers requesting that book.

Still, at EWU, bookstore director Bob Anderson says, every year his store writes off $10,000 to $15,000 worth of buybacks it can’t resell. Profits last year amounted to 1.8 percent, which went into a bookstore reserve fund for equipment like carpet or cash registers.

The National Association of College Bookstores uses U.S. Department of Labor statistics to compare the rate of inflation on wholesale prices. It’s been just under 6 percent on other goods since 1998, but nearly 42 percent on college textbooks.

Catherine Scott runs the community colleges bookstores. “Eighteen years ago the thought of having a $100 book in the store was ludicrous,” she says. “Now we probably have 20 of them.”

She and McLean both hear of students who drop classes because the required texts are too expensive, those who share books, and those who try to simply wing a class without the book.

Jeff Bjur hasn’t found any good alternative.

“It’s one of those dreadful things you do,” he says. “It’s kind of like walking to your doom.”

His dad sees public school districts struggling to pay for textbooks, too. He thinks that’s because textbook costs have risen exponentially compared to the costs of other products.

“I don’t think it’s the authors that are getting rich,” he says. “I think it’s the publishers.”

Textbook publishers have been painted with sour grinchy frowns in this public debate. A recent California study accused textbook publishers of not only introducing unnecessary and exorbitantly expensive new textbook editions, often bundled with expensive study guides, CDs and passwords to online instructional sites, but also selling their texts overseas for lower prices.

One company sold one of its calculus texts to American students for $125, Canadian students for $97 and to British students for $65, according to the California Student Public Interest Research Group. Soon college kids will be asking those grandmas driving to Canada for blood pressure medicine to swing by campus bookstores for physics texts.

Whether it’s producing pharmaceuticals or textbooks, capitalism simply has a few flaws. The needs of our society, for health care and education, wind up ignored as we race to serve shareholders. Short-term profits, however, won’t build the future Americans want for their children and grandchildren.

The Bjur family has planned and budgeted carefully, but many other students graduate with massive debt, averaging $18,900 in 2002. As they venture into the world, they’ll discover it’s harder to settle into adult life with these monthly loan payments looming over them.

Several innovative ideas seem to be surfacing. Publishers have begun to offer a few reduced-price, no-frills texts.

Textbook rental programs have sprung up on some campuses. In a few states, legislation has been introduced to urge publishers to trim costs and disclose book prices to faculty when they’re making textbook selections.

And then there’s always the bookstore director’s last best hope.

When the Cougars go to the Rose Bowl, or the Zags dance down the road to the Final Four, bookstore sales of school sweatshirts, hats and T-shirts spike. Margins on college texts may only be 20 percent, but clothing margins can run as high as 50 percent.

EWU’s Bob Anderson remembers with envy the numbers he’s seen from WSU and GU bookstore operations during their best years. He knows that if Eastern’s basketball program takes off, there’s a chance he can shave his textbook prices.

Don’t be surprised to see him yelling at those games.

Go Eags!