No matter what your major is, the first lesson you learn in college is in economics: Education is pricey.

And an increasingly onerous share of the expense comes from textbooks. The cost of goods and services is going to rise – that’s a given. But a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that textbook prices have risen at two times the pace of inflation over the past two decades.

When there is that great a disparity, inquiring minds look for a reason.

In this case, reasons were easy to identify, allowing the Legislature to come up with an appropriate response. Under Substitute House Bill 3087, signed Wednesday by Gov. Chris Gregoire, the upward pressure on college textbook prices in Washington should be relieved.

That is good news, and not just for students and their families. Today’s world demands an educated work force, young people who will use their knowledge and creativity to keep the state and the nation competitive with aggressive economies around the globe. Anything that inflates the cost of higher education creates a drag on prosperity.

Under the bill, Washington state’s public four-year universities, plus The Evergreen State College, are encouraged to come up with practices that give students the least costly options for acquiring course materials.

Regents and trustees are to adopt rules that require bookstores to let students buy “unbundled” books – that is, those that aren’t packaged with other materials such as CDs that students may not need. Under the new law, faculty members will be obliged to consider the “least costly” guideline when assigning course materials.

The practices targeted by SHB 3087 not only drive prices of new materials up, they undermine the used-book market that has enabled past generations of college students to economize. Professors who assign a new text each year, or a new edition, make it impossible for incoming students to buy used texts or for outgoing students to sell theirs at a reasonable price.

The 2005 College Store Industry Financial Report puts the average price of a new textbook at $52.36, and a used one at $40.01.

For the current academic year, the Financial Aid Association assumes books and materials to cost $924, a 3.1 percent increase over the previous year. But while that’s consistent with cost-of-living increases in Washington state, the GAO study showed textbooks go up an average 6 percent a year.

At that rate, if nothing were done, textbook prices would only spiral further out of control.

Predictably, bookstore operators’ opinions differ from campus to campus as to whether there is a serious problem and, if there is, whether the new law will fix it. Indeed, it will take a year or two of experience to determine if this approach works or needs some fine-tuning.

But by taking the action they took, the Legislature and the governor have served notice that they take a dim view of exploiting college students. That’s a message that universities, professors, bookstores and publishers should take seriously, if they’re smart.