The cost of a textbook often exceeds $300, the cost of tuition at community colleges for a three credit course is close to $300. The cost for textbooks adds significantly to the burden on students and parents. It is negatively affecting higher education in the US as students seek to escape economic thrall by not buying books, selling them as soon as they can or downloading on-line bootleg copies.
Recently campus administrators, legislators and the media have become alarmed at the pressures this is putting on students with colleges, state legislatures and boards of education trying to figure out how to reduce textbook costs.
Textbook cost is a non-partisan issue. Both right and left are dissatisfied with the status quo but neither side goes
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Many faculty have independently written texts which are available to their students on line at no cost. Still, this is not enough. A coordinated set of supporting resources is required for wide ranging adoption. A key to establishing high quality open on line educational resources will be departments and universities rewarding all who help make these resources available.
One of the best known on-line educational resources is the ChemWiki, led by Delmar Larsen of the University of California Davis. Started as a no cost chemistry textbook site, today it holds over 18,000 web pages, many complete textbooks and has over five million viewers per month.
It is evolving horizontally to include other STEM areas including physics, mathematics, biology, geology and statistics, and vertically to incorporate an intelligent homework system, an open access classroom response system, virtual laboratories and much more. The strength of this growing STEM Hyperlibrary is the large number of faculty and students involved in its development. I am one. The Hyperlibrary is one of the many educational resources made available to students and interested web surfers by faculty across the world.
Open online textbooks are an answer to the textbook cost crisis. The lesson I have learned is that they must become complete educational systems to be widely
These days, colleges are seemingly endless money pits. Did you know that in 1970 at a public university, tuition on average was only $2,710? Today, we could only dream of it being so low. Once you start looking at the actual average prices of attending a college or a university, you start to think it’s a joke with how expensive it is. It’s definitely no joke. The annual cost for undergraduate tuition, room and board is estimated to be $12,804 at public institutions and $32,184 at private institutions for the 2010 academic year, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. That means that even a modest education—a bachelor’s degree from a public university or college—will cost at least $50,000. You can find cheaper colleges for example if you attended a community college, but many of those you cannot get more than a two year degree with. There are also colleges with pr...
This article, “Why Are Textbooks So Expensive?” by Henry Roediger reveals the truth of why textbooks are so pricey. He shows how textbooks prices are costly not because of inflation, corporate textbook companies, and frequent revisions, but because of the sale of used textbooks. The article is elaborating on why used textbooks are the real culprit as well. One main point that is highlighted is that used textbooks are resold for many years. The initial selling of the textbook is the only time the author will make a profit, but the bookstore will make a profit every time they resell a used book. It is essential for the author to raise the price to compensate for the loss of money when dealing with used textbooks.
... Textbook Prices Increasing Faster Than Tuition And Inflation." Http://www.huffingtonpost.com/. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Dec. 2013.
In order to best understand why implementing such a loan program would be most beneficial to the students one must understand why textbook prices have spiraled out of control. The problem lies with textbook pub...
The next point that Parsons makes is that because of the budget cuts there is a shortage of paper on campus. Students are to download syllabus and absorb the cost of printing themselves. Therefore, raising the cost of being a student. I can’t say that I completely agree with this point. In the couple of years that I have been in college I have never had to print syllabuses off of the Internet. I was always given a copy from my instructor.
Just one book alone can cost around a hundred dollars and if you have to buy five books, that is five hundred dollars just for books. For biology majors, a biology book can sometimes cost two to three hundred dollars. Also colleges charge fees for their students, some examples of the fees Lourdes University charges are, Technology fee of seventy five dollars, a health services fee of seventy five dollars and biology majors a fee of seventy dollars for lab, all per semester. The author of “College May Cost More Than You Think” writes, “Once your students has been accepted and is about to head off to school, you’ll receive your first tuition bill. The bottom line on the statement may have shocked you, but at least you thought, you knew what was ahead. However, don’t put your checkbook away just yet” (1). This quotes tells the truth that you think your tuition bill is going to be this much, but a curveball is thrown and your tuition bill is really this much.
With the rapid growth of college tuition, it has become an important issue in higher education. College Tuition is simply defined as the charge or fee for instruction, at a private school or a college or a university. Most people agree today that college tuition is too high or that it needs to be completely dismissed. There are some however, that may disagree with the claim about college tuition and state that college tuition is necessary for college growth, and it’s primary purpose is to pay for college expenses to support the institution financially. Research shows that college tuition is too high and that debt has become a standard in America after attending post-secondary school.
In Austin, Texas, every decade fifteen people influence what is taught to the next generation of American children. The highly politicized Texas Board of Education gets to rewrite the teaching standards and textbook standards for its approximate 5 million schoolchildren. However, any changes made in Texas, trickle down into the rest of the nation. Texas is home to one of the nation's largest textbook markets (the other being the state of California), because as a state, it decides what textbooks schools can buy, rather than leaving it up to local districts (“The Revolutionaries”). Hence, publishers face the economic conundrum of whether they curtail the intellect...
Caruso, C. (2008). Bringing Online Learning to Life. Educational Leadership, 65(8) 70. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
In the other hand, there’s many people who think college education is not worth it. The price of education actually has been rising at a rapid pace. Tuition and fees at American universities and institutions of higher education rose 439% from 1982 to 2007, according to a 2008 report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, San Jose, California. That surpassed the 251% increase in the cost of health care in the United States during the same period, and was nearly three times higher than the income growth of an average family.
All institutions whether attending a university, community, or even a technical college, requires the student to purchase a textbook in order to be successful in the class. Some textbooks aren’t even open all semester and the information and statistics can be out of date and can greatly affect your overall knowledge on certain topics. In addition, cost free text books can enhance the quality of education by the teachers and serve more accessibility to working students. Although councils and administrations can’t approve cost free text books, policies such as, Open Textbook, bookstore rentals, and affordable textbook act should be offered nationwide. As an experienced freshmen surviving the first year of college, textbooks should be purchased free of cost provided by institutions throughout the country.
Pearcy, Mark. “Student, Teacher, Professor: Three Perspectives on Online Education.” History Teacher 27.2 (2014): 169-185. Education Research Complete. Web. 2 April 2014.
First of all, buying an e-book is cheaper than a printed book. As a student who is studying in college, I know students have to buy text books for all the classes. According to an article from website, “average price of best-selling e-books is $5-$11, and most text-books’ price is around $200 which are selling in bookstore even rental books should cost 50% of the new books’ price.” We can immediately know that e-books are much cheaper than printed
At the same time as the publishing industry was developing in the USA, the states enacted legislation controlling the adoption of textbooks and the provision of free textbooks. In Kordus’s (2000) article, it was found that legislation standardizing procedures for adopting textbooks arose during the mid-nineteenth century in each state in response to the development of graded organization requiring uniform textbooks for formal schooling in classes. Initially, uniformity was practiced at the local level through laws requiring each local school board to adopt a list of textbooks, which parents were required to supply over a given period of time.
Since the Internet was created it has always had an effect on education. After military establishments Universities were the first real contributors to the Internet's structure. The Internet has vastly improved education. There are so many ways that education and the Internet are connected these days. Almost every textbook has a corresponding Internet sight including the one for this course. [http://www.scsite.com/dc2002/