Expensive Textbooks Essay

Expensive Textbooks Textbooks are a must in almost every university. On top of tuition, dining and housing fees, high cost of textbooks is a huge burden on the students. Every student wants to buy the textbooks for their class as the books are the best source for their study, but the main barrier is the high price of the books. According to NBC's review of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, textbook prices have risen over three times the rate of inflation from January 1977 to June 2015, a 1,041 percent increase(Popken). Further, researches have shown that a student spends around twelve hundred dollars a year on textbooks(Senack6). Imagine a student you know from your neighbor, who has a poor financial background and spends 1200
That day I got to know that even the cost of books had a direct impact on how many or which classes students took. Even some students try to get through classes without buying the books, which has affected their grades badly. A 2014 study conducted by the Student Public Interest Research Group found 65 percent of students skipped purchasing a textbook because of cost(Senack11). Along with these problems, some professors demand a specific edition of textbooks which would cost hundreds of dollars more than the older version and the only difference students could find is the physical appearance of the books. The California Student Public Interest Research Group published a study in 2004 that found new editions cost 58 percent more than older editions and newer editions are not that different from previous
Open source textbooks can be a great solution to decrease the expenses on the textbooks as all the resources are available on the internet for free. In addition, it can be accessible anywhere at any time so, students shouldn’t carry heavy textbooks all the time. Although, some might argue that many students have habit to study from hard copies or textbooks; they can easily download and print from the open source textbook which might cost only 20 – 40 dollars to print compared to hundreds of dollars on text books. Moreover, it can be easily edited by teachers as per their need, and students can learn what their teachers really want them to focus on. Yet, some might argue that why would professors waste their time editing textbooks when they can easily recommend textbooks to students. Though, they can recommend; the textbooks might always miss something or write more about something which the professor require or don’t respectively. Also, editing the open source textbook is not like writing a textbook which consumes a lot of time, it’s just adding or removing some necessary or unnecessary information. Hence, another problem of buying older versions or new versions books per the teacher’s choice can be easily