Lawmakers Consider Capping the Price of College Textbooks
College tuition is high and the books required are pricey too. Lawmakers in Washington have a new bill regarding this issue.
John Hendricks from KXLY reports.
Lawmakers look at capping price of college text books
The cost of college in Washington could soon be coming down as lawmakers are looking at capping the price of text books.
Students at Eastern Washington University in Cheney say they spend upwards of $200 for just one book.
“If you take like three classes and then you have like four or five books for each one and it’s like $400 or $500 for each class,” EWU student Lisa Cano said.
“I think that they are absolutely way to high and they are really hard to pay for,” EWU student Shontel Shaw said.
“A lot of them I got didn’t end up needing so the prices racked up and I didn’t even use them at all,” EWU student Brook Tunstall said.
One bill being talked about in Olympia would restrict professors from requiring books that cost more than $100.
“That would be good, it’s still kind of expensive but I mean that would be better than $200,” Shaw said.
A second bill is also being looked at in Olympia. It would create a pilot program at Eastern Washington University. The program would allow the university’s library to give up to 10 professors grant money to look at ways to avoid using text books.
Both bills will be discussed Tuesday during a hearing of the House Higher Education Committee.
Comments
As an adjunct business law instructor at a 2-year college in Washington, I have no say in the text chosen. I can only offer that our required text is a custom looseleaf edition of a standard business law text. The full standard edition is about $225, and our customized version is $175. Not cheap, but it is an excellent text and the college’s selection already saves our students money.
The solution is not capping prices (we do elect a lot of Democrat fools, aka economics ignoramuses, in this state), but rather moving towards digital editions. My college already requires faculty to mount all classes as much as possible on the college’s electronic learning system, so the leap to digital and thereby less costly textbooks is a small one. Publishers are slow to go that way, probably for many reasons, including lower profit margins, and less money to pay royalties to authors who create the textbooks in the first place.
I know! Let’s make community college FREE! Then textbook prices won’t seem so high. That’s the ticket.