6/23/2023 0 Comments College art text bookSome professors don’t assign textbooks at all, instead opting to fill their syllabi with a combination of journal articles and other texts, some of which cost money, some of which don’t. (Scott Virkler, the chief product officer for the higher education group at McGraw-Hill, told me that books for “quantitative courses” tend to cost more because “the content itself costs a lot more to build and maintain” than it does for other types of courses.) Books for humanities courses like art history tend to cost less than those for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) courses like chemistry or calculus. Not all textbooks are created equal, and not all textbooks are equally priced. The College Board suggests that students set aside $1,200 each year for books and other course materials, which can be an exorbitant amount of money for students who come from low-income backgrounds. Compared to tuition, which can cost out-of-state students at public universities as much as $26,000 per year or upward of $40,000 at some private colleges, the amount of money students spend on things like textbooks can seem negligible.īut the price of textbooks has similarly skyrocketed over the past decade: Textbook costs increased 88 percent between 20, according to the BLS report. Why textbooks cost what they doĬonversations about college affordability tend to focus on tuition, and with good reason - the cost of attending college in the US increased 63 percent between 20, according to a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But affordability advocates say that if anyone is to blame for the fact that textbook costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s, it’s the publishers - and, advocates claim, these new technologies are publishers’ attempt to maintain their stranglehold on the industry while disguising it as reform. Publishers claim that new technologies, like digital textbooks and Netflix-style subscription services, make textbooks more affordable for all. Textbook publishers, for their part, have begun acknowledging that textbooks and other course materials have become so expensive that some students simply can’t afford them, even if it means their grades will suffer as a result. Her situation is far from unusual: A 2014 report by the Public Interest Research Groups found that two-thirds of surveyed students had skipped buying or renting some of their required course materials because they couldn’t afford them. In other words, her generous financial aid package isn’t enough to cover the essentials. Hannah’s tuition and housing is covered by scholarships, but she has to use student loans to pay for her health insurance she pays for other necessities, including textbooks, out of pocket. If she couldn’t find them there, then she would do without. “I used my free trial to do pretty much all my work for the semester and to take screenshots of things so I could access everything once the trial ended,” she said. That semester, Hannah, who asked that her name be withheld due to privacy reasons, found most of the books she needed on Scribd, an e-book subscription service. “Even when I was studying abroad,” she said, “there was no way for me to get through the semester without dropping $500-plus on textbooks, which I couldn’t afford.” Hannah, a senior at a private university in New York City, can’t think of a single semester when she bought all the books she needed for her classes.
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