Time for a Rant!
4 September 2006The whole time I went to college I complained about this. Now my daughter is in college and it’s even worse. What am I talking about? The price of college textbooks.
Go to Barnes & Noble or any good book store and buy a high quality coffee table book and the most you’ll pay for it is maybe $50.00. Buy a used college math book and and you’ll pay $100 or more. They have a captive audience who must buy the books so they can charge whatever they want! And they do. That’s the result of a monopoly.
On top of that, they’ll publish a new edition of a math book every couple of years. We’re talking college algebra here, not upper lever theoretical stuff. There are no new advances to be added to a new edition of the book. But the publishers don’t want students buying used books, they’d lose sales! So they publish new editions, making the older books obsolete. The colleges, apparently in cahoots with the publishers, adopt the new edition immediately and students who had the old edition can’t sell it and current students lose the option to at least buy used.
How can the free market be introduced into this system? Used books are a small attempt, particularly on sites like Amazon.com as opposed to the campus book store but the publishing cycle circumvents that and stops it from ever being real competition.
Until colleges and universities actually take an interest in their students the problem will remain. But since these institutions aren’t concerned about the tens of thousands of dollars of debt they’re saddling today’s students with, why would they worry about the cost of books?
I watched the FOX News special on the price of higher education the other night and I find myself agreeing with its conclusions. Education is a racket all around. Kids need it but they are being royally ripped off getting it. There appears to be no answer in sight.
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September 5th, 2006 at 10:22 am
I agree with all you say about the college scam! Hopefully some brilliant entrepreneur will come up with a way to make the publishers have to bring the prices down. I think the online college concept is really giving the traditional colleges a run for their money, and I don’t think they saw it coming until it hit them. So surely some entrepreneur will find a way on this issue too!
September 5th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
I hope you’re right. I’m not sure how that would work though, unless a competing publisher pushed it. That would be a great way to do it, a new publisher trying to take a large share of the market. But the colleges are making money too through their book stores and the deal would have to keep them making as much money as they are now.