Back to school means back to school expenses.
The National Retail Federation (NRF) reports students and families will spend $47.3 billion preparing for college. Students and their parents will spend a combined average of $956.93 on back-to-college merchandise, up from last year’s $880.52.
There is the obligatory spending on clothing and accessories. Adding to the final bill will be purchases of laptops, digital cameras, iPhones, other cell phones, shoes, notebooks, folders and pencils.
And we cannot forget textbooks. The NRF says, “Over $15 billion will be spent on textbooks, which are perhaps the only real necessity for college students.”
College textbooks are not cheap. Stateline.org says at the University of Wisconsin, a used copy of Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity goes for $109.90.
In July, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents ordered its universities to prepare and submit plans by December on how they will lower textbook prices. The move came after a study by the University of Wisconsin’s Office of Operations Review and Audit found that students pay about $300 for books at some state schools but about $950 at others. The audit shows that students at the UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison campuses can pay more than twice as much for their books as their counterparts at schools such as UW-La Crosse or UW-River Falls.
Why the discrepancy in textbook prices? One reason for the varying prices is textbook rental programs that allow students to be charged a flat fee to the university to rent books each semester. The fee is much cheaper than buying books at the retail price. The cheaper prices at La Crosse and River Falls can be attributed to book rental programs on those campuses.
There are some drawbacks to book rental programs. UW officials say they are expensive to start, and professors feel their textbook choices aren’t as great. A suggestion has been made by Julie Gordon, director of UW’s Office of Operations Review and Audit that if new schools started using the rental programs, they should initially cover introductory-level classes.
Expensive college textbooks are a nationwide dilemma that Congress even saw fit to investigate. The Associated Press writes, “A report by the Government Accountability Office two years ago found that prices had risen at more than twice the rate of inflation over the previous two decades. The national average ranges from $644 to as much as $900 a year for books.”
Stateline.org reports there is a nationwide effort is underway on college campuses to lower the cost of textbooks. You can read the entire Stateline.org article
here.
