Help may be on the way for students discouraged over the rising price of textbooks.
In the wake of a new concern by several state legislatures over textbook prices, many public universities have taken new steps to arrest the ballooning cost of going to college by attempting to save students money on their course materials.
But their efforts have not been copied everywhere, leaving some students holding the bag after they are forced to spend on materials that may not be necessary.
"I think there was a pattern in the past just to be a little lazy and assign a whole book when you were only going to use part of it," said Political Science professor Rogers Smith. But "I think that practice is less common than it used to be," he added, saying that the practice of posting free material online has become commonplace. Even that solution, though, may never have a significant impact simply because teachers are reluctant to abandon written material.
"A lot of faculty, including me, have reservations about that, because you worry that the students won't download their reading material," Smith said. "Whereas if they actually have it in the packet already, they're more likely to read it."
But at this point, most of the efforts aimed at reducing Penn's textbook prices on the supply side still seem to be coming from professors themselves, rather than from administrators. Said Psychology professor Dianne Chambless, "At other universities ... we would get requests from the deans saying to consider using the same book over multiple years, so that students would be able to buy used copies and be able to get a good resale for their book."
"I just don't recall there ever having been a discussion here" about that, she added.
Rhea Lewis, spokeswoman for Business Services, says that Penn has encouraged faculty members to help keep prices down in another way: by asking them to submit orders for next year's materials as early as possible. This would allow the Penn Bookstore to begin buying from students earlier and put more cheap, used copies of textbooks into circulation for students.
She added that a bookstore committee has been formed that includes both graduate and undergraduates, and that the lowering of prices is one of its top priorities.
"We have examples of professors who have changed the version of the book they are using when they find out ... differences [in editions], who have talked with publishers to get them to produce more of a certain version that is cheaper for students," Lewis said. "We definitely are seeing that faculty do care about that."
Another option available to Penn students is to recoup some losses by re-selling their books.
Many of the online groups that buy and then distribute used textbooks for profit have also branched out, dealing in such items as used DVDs, school supplies and works of fiction.
According to Lewis, though, Penn's buyback program is competitive with the private sector for those wishing to dump their books on the market. Her office also reported a doubling in the amount of money given to students for their used books for the 2004-05 school year.
The program may have other advantages as well.
One student, College junior Jordan Grossman, reported that after several of his friends rented some living space to an online book service, betterthanthebookstore.com, they returned to find "literally over a thousand books on the porch of the house" before the service was set to move in.
"We thought it was pretty shady," Grossman said.
Regardless of the effectiveness of any of the options available to students, the issue looks to become more pressing in the coming years. "I'm just appalled at how expensive things have gotten," Chambless said.
