By Joseph Lane
According to a 2013 study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the prices of textbooks for college students rose 82 percent from 2002-2012, compared to an increase of just 28 percent for overall consumer goods in that time span.
The issue of rapidly increasing textbook prices was addressed by NPR’s “Planet Money” last week. As the program pointed out, professors pick the textbooks — generally ignoring cost — while students are paying for it and (allegedly) receiving the benefits.
Professors, understandably, are not interested in guiding their course with a subpar textbook simply to save students save a few dollars. But the reality is that to a student who is staring down the gun at several years of student debt, adding another $300 for a textbook they may not end up using is maddening at best.
The problem, described by host Jacob Goldstein, is one that economists call the “principal-agent problem,” in which the person selecting the product is not the person purchasing or benefiting from it. Another common example of the principal-agent problem cited by NPR is health care. When you go to the hospital, you don’t specify to the doctor which type of IV you would like or what drug you should get, you merely trust the physician’s expert opinion.
And while this is the case for the professor-student relationship for textbooks, there are other considerations in this purchase that make the hospital analogy incomplete. For example, professors often assign a textbook as an additional resource that may be used to supplement the class material — as opposed to actually being the core source of education.
I can no longer count the number of classes I have taken at the University of Iowa in which I have learned far more from the professor and her or his lecture notes than from the textbook itself. Textbooks have played an important role in some of my classes — specifically some of the more detail-oriented science courses — but in many others, they have merely collected dust.
But most of this issue falls on the textbook producer, not the professor. “Planet Money” interviewed several individuals familiar with the textbook industry, and they all described a trend unfolding in the textbook industry. As students begin to sell used books online and bookstores offer rental plans, textbook manufacturers have been forced to raise the price of their new textbooks, the same textbooks that professors indicate are needed for their classes.
David Levin, the president and CEO of McGraw-Hill, told “Planet Money” that it has 500 engineers and employs roughly $150 million invests each year in product creation and digital assets rather than traditional textbooks. Levin, in many ways, sees this as the future of his business: digital textbooks, eBooks, and interactive books that will better teach modern students.
Despite the financial discomfort McGraw-Hill may be responsible for over the years, I have to agree with Levin.
In a time when everything in our lives as students is digital, paper textbooks simply do not make sense. This isn’t to say that textbook companies should simply create online versions of their existing textbooks; rather, these companies should create an additional interactive resource for students.
In the coming years, college students will be members of the first “digitally native” generation. These students grew up with the internet — they never knew otherwise; trying to teach them with a textbook will prove ineffective and costly. It’s time for universities to quit textbooks cold turkey, not only because it’s costing students an arm and a leg but because these books aren’t nearly as effective as they once were.
