You've just recently come back to school or are about to and you signed up for some intriguing classes, some okay classes and some boring required classes. All these require something; a necessity to understand the material and to learn. Aside from professors I am of course talking about text books.
We all know that the price of a college tuition has gone up drastically over the past several years. "the average cost of total tuition and fees at private colleges last year rose to $22,218" which represented an increase of "5.9%" from last year alone; if you include room and board the cost jumps to "$30,367" (1). The cost of public universities also had a substantial increase in cost. The cost of textbooks has also risen substantially.
The often understated cost of textbooks is often some of the most outrageous price gouging of all. According to one article the cost of textbooks "averages close to $1,000 a year." (2) I feel this price, (being an average an all) is gross, but also grossly under representative of what books can and do cost. For this semester alone, I spent over $700 on textbooks. Although this may be above average there are surely others whose books have cost much more.
The cost of textbooks does vary somewhat depending on the courses one chooses. For example history, math and science classes' textbooks are often much more expensive than other classes which rely less heavily on textbooks. As a result, some majors have a cheaper time because they have less books to buy.
Majors such as History, Chemistry, Math, and even Political Science which rely heavily on the textbooks have huge costs which must be paidvery quickly or else face the consequences of taking a class that almost exclusively relies on a textbook and risk falling behind and sacrificing your grade which you have a disgusting sum for because you cannot afford the books. It is the fact that textbooks are so necessary for success which makes the demand for them so inelastic and therefore allows book publishers to charge outrageous prices for one small book because they can.
What is even worse is the limited number of places you can buy your books. The community college I go to, like many other colleges and universities has structured their book buying so that you are almost forced to buy from them. You are forced to buy the books at the college bookstores for substantially more than you could buy them elsewhere. Hiowever, the alternative of buying books online at places like Half.com is often difficult because you have to have the books shipped to you in time for your class or risk getting behind. It is for this reason that I am continually forced to empty both my wallet to purchase the necessary books to succeed in my classes from the campus bookstore.
It seems no great mystery why the average college student is taking longer and longer to graduate which in part could be from all the egregious expenses and textbooks to top it off!
For me, I cannot imagine trying to pay my own way through school and being able to graduate with any sort of decent grades. Many college students are thus forced to work multiple jobs to partially cover the cost of higher education.I am really disgusted with much of the system and how much it seems that college students like us are being exploited because of our desire to educate ourselves for a better future. Yet, there is little to be done what with the neccessity of the books it seems we are forced to be gouged on the expensive textbooks we must have to succeed.
(1) Chaker, Anne Marie. Your Money Matters: Nest Egg;Seven Myths About College Financial Aid. The Wall Street Journal. New York, NY. July 9, 2007.
(2) Bodnar, Janet. Surprise! More College Costs.Kiplinger's Money Smart Kids Web Column. August 1,2007.
Tuition is going through the roof because of supply and demand. Colleges and Universities are raising tuition just because they can. They are filling their student bodies at the higher rates so why not raise the rates to the point where they match demand. Their behavior is entirely rational.
The reason colleges are able to continue to fill their enrollments despite exhorbinant tuition is because only a handful of students pay the full tuition out of their own pockets. If people really had to cough up $30,000 annually in order to go to college, very few people could afford to go and demand would fall sharply. Schools would be forced to lower tuition in order to attract enough students.
Tuition rates have nothing to do with a University's cost structure so there is a lot of room for rates to fall. Think about it! The cost of providing a highschool student a year of eductation is $8 to 10 thousand per year across the country. Colleges and Universities often have MUCH higher student to teacher ratios and many of those freshman and sophmore lecture classes are taught by very poorly paid graduate students. There is no reason why colleges need to collect $20k or 30K per student when their costs per student are lower than the typical highschool. They are doing it simply because they can.
The only way most students pay for college is with a combination of grants, scholarships, loans, money from parents, and their own earnings. A lot of those grants and scholarships are funded by the government. Without them, demand for college would be much lower because few could afford it; rather than college they would go to work. Colleges would need to lower tuition to attract demand at a lower tuition.
The government funded grants and scholarships are distorting the market, wasting taxpayer money and ultimately self-defeating. They really don't help anybody because the universities just raise tuition to capture those taxpayer dollars while still leaving students with a huge expense that needs to be met with loans or from their own and their paren'ts pockets.
You are looking at college tuition from a very one dimensional perspective. From what you have said you you believe that students are the number one cost a university has. However, this is not the case.
Often large universities have to spend a lot of money to fund their programs. Most major universities have highly expensive scientific research going on, on campus which cost thousands of dollars to use the time, expensive scientific equipment, personnel, building space etc needed to devote to this scientific research. Also many universities have a huge parking crunch. The limited parking on campus creates huge problems everyday and almost every university I have been to has been building new parking structures which cost in the millions. In addition, new facilities and new faculty due to larger number of students also contribute to the need to raise college tuition.
I would also like to say this blog was meant to address the cost of textbooks more so than the rising cost of tuition but I thank you for your opinions.
"Its all very well in practice but it will never work in theory."
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/daimler
Did "binding" refer to textbooks? I missed that until I read it again and I guess it is still a little too subtle for me. The cost of tuition was definately mentioned in the original blog and my post was responsive to that. Certainly the cost of textbooks is trivial when compared to the cost of tuition.
Students are paying for a service. I can see why tuition might go up as a result of building parking lots because parking is quite arguably part of that service.
But why do you think that Universities massive research programs should be funded from student tuition? Students are not necessarily the beneficiaries of this research. An English liturature student or almost any other liberal arts student gets practically no benefit from scientific research. Much of the researh is conducted for the benefit of government and the private sector. Perhaps they should pay the cost of this research rather than hanging it on students who are generally about the most poverty stricken adults in our population. And many smaller colleges have tuitions even higher than the big research universities and many of them conduct very little expensive research although their professors are expected to publish.
It seems like students are being expected to cross subsidize expenses from which they get little or only indirect benefit. I think the market is distorted by the fact that most students aren't having to pay full tuition.
When you're paying thousands of dollars to go to school and have to pay close to a thousand for overpriced textbooks it is a little ridiculous considering many people are already going into debt to go to a university.Especially since these books aren't worth anywhere near what they cost.
Yes, binding was supposed to be a pun because they are both required and have their pages bound together.
"Its all very well in practice but it will never work in theory."
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/daimler
Lucky for me, a lot of the texts I have to read are available for free online. And, while I prefer to read things in physical form, free is a lot more attractive than non-refundable $50. For a 50-page, hardback, third edition, rare translation of some obscure play written by no one anyone's ever heard of and that you can only get at this one hole-in-the-wall bookstore that's on backorder because your professor is a hippie who doesn't believe in the corporate media. A hippie who also assigns that obscure play to be the subject of our final paper, worth 50% of our grade.
So I end up buying all the books anyway, which just makes the free option all the more painfully inconvenient.
Technically, tuition at University of California campuses (and maybe California State University campuses?) is free, but the educational fees-- don't ask me how this isn't tuition-- are upwards of $7,800 per semester. After housing and the dumb student fees we "vote" for are factored in, public education costs around $21-22,000 per year.
The books are really just insult to injury.
Once I transfer to UC I'll be facing that. I am very pissed about the books because my tuition is relatively low right now. However, it bugs me that as Poly Sci major I'll be facing overpriced books every year and that they are only going to get thicker and more expensive.
"Its all very well in practice but it will never work in theory."
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/daimler
What's nice about the Berkeley poli sci classes is that they usually just make fat readers for all the chapters of the books they want you to read, instead of making you buy all the books.
The readers get expensive, but not compared to the individual books; plus some subversive (cheap) professors get readers copied without paying the copyrights, so they're even less expensive. Come to Berkeley!
...but not even close to being true, and certainly not at public colleges and universities.
State institutions have gone from being funded primarily by the state to now receiving only anywhere from 8 to 25% of their funding from their respective states. The cost of utilities continues to rise. It becomes more expensive to recruit and retain quality instructors and administrators. And increased federal and state mandates have all created additional work that must be completed, without providing any funding.
Only now are most public schools realizing how important alumni support can be and truly getting into fund-raising and capital campaigning. And public institutions still have a long way to go to catch up to the private sector. All this while our infrastructures (just like elsewhere in America), created post World War II and through the 1970s, are deteriorating and needing significant improvements or replacement. Here we have buildings that it makes more sense to tear down, just because it would cost millions to fix walls, ceilings, pipes and wiring, and all of those improvements would not make the building look at all better (or live any better) for students.
Finally, add in (as in my state) places where state laws have been passed to regulate tuition. Colleges and universities essentially have to "guess" what their operational needs are going to be for the next four years because, once their prices are set, they can't go back and change them. You bet schools are going to guess high; the cost of doing otherwise could create major operational problems.
There is no conspiracy on tuition. Colleges and universities are caught between a rock and a hard place. Of course students are going to feel that crunch.
$700?!
Wow, I am up to $350 ish and I thought I was doing poorly.
I even bought all my books new, becuase they were out of used books by the time I got the list.
Of course, I HATE when teachers like suddenly add something that wasn't on the list.
My teacher added a CPS unit which may only be used in her class, is non returnable and $25. Doesn't sound like much, but it really is. That's like, a couple cheap dinners.
There is a book store off campus that sells used books cheaper, however if you don't get to that bookstore like, before classes start, you just have to buy new ones anyway ><
The PitGoddess!
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/the-pitgoddess
Have you checked for it on Big Words yet? You can often find the books cheaper there than anywhere else.
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"It is never too late to give up your prejudices." Henry David Thoreau
"In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you've heard the other side." Euripides
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Fallon