The business of post secondary education, and training programs has taken off in terms of profit margins in specific areas, but none more than in the area of textbooks.
When I was a student (many years ago), the profit centers for Universities were:
- Tuition Fees
- Government Funding
- Private Funding
- Gifts from alumni
- Services on campus
There was also another income center which was shared between the professors and the school and that was the sale of textbooks. When I started at U of Waterloo there were not that many texts on computers, and the ones we used were quite expensive, but now the entire text book market has exploded, and the prices have increased a great deal.
Why, is my question, are textbooks still so darn expensive? The simple answer is, profits, and a captive audience. If a professor makes the textbook compulsory for a course, he is forcing students to either:
- Buy the textbook new
- Buy it from a Used Book Store (which many times, is a previous version and may not be up to date, or worse a different text is to be used (which happens a lot in technology courses)).
- Rent the book ? Yes there are such services out there as well.
- Find a “boot leg” PDF, or similar “unofficial” version
These textbook costs are on top of the new Large Service fees from Universities, and also the costs of living away from home (if that is the case). Hope you folks are saving, if you plan on helping your kids out with post-secondary education costs.
How expensive can these books be? In the photo in this post, those two books added up to $350.00, and there were other books that could have been purchased.
My dad sends me these newsletters every week and this one especially resonated with me. As a current U of Waterloo student unfortunately nothing has changed. Textbook costs can be more than a month of rent and they often turn into paperweights that you cannot resell due to a new edition or change in professor and some people won’t buy them if they have a dot of highlighter! Now on top of textbook costs some professors also opt to use an iclicker system for participation marks (they ask questions in class and you answer via a clicker with different multiple choice options) these run for $20, good thing about these is that you can resell them and often you’ll have to use them in more than one class. But a new system is top hat, essentially the same idea, but it requires a subscription either for the term or full year at $25 or $40 respectively.
It was funny opening this weeks newsletter and saw this article as I had just finished complaining to my dad about a $200 book, $25 top hat subscription and because it’s a stats course, a $120 calculator. I’m in my 4th year and this is definitely the most expensive course I’ve taken and likely the only time I’ll ever have use for that calculator!
Advice for other students, wait until you go to your first class to make sure the text book is needed, check Amazon and your schools used bookstore and join a textbook exchange site or Facebook group.