Opinion School is expensive, textbooks shouldn’t be

By A.J. NEWTH Associate Opinion Editor

College isn’t cheap. For some students, financial aid can make or break their college decisions. For others, they’re comfortable enough to attend any school of their choosing. But one thing that most students can agree on from both ends of the financial spectrum is that textbooks are ridiculously expensive.

I attended a public high school, so before college, I never needed to purchase expensive educational materials besides the occasional $20 vocabulary book or the latest trendy folders and binders.

I was warned about the cost of textbooks in college, but I never imagined that the average textbook would cost between $80 and $150, according to the Education Data Initiative. Additionally, the site states that the average college student spends anywhere between $628 and $1,471 annually for textbooks alone in an academic year (consisting of two 15 to 17 week semesters).

This spring marks my fourth semester at Quinnipiac University excluding summer and January courses, and almost every class I have taken has required a textbook. As a freshman, I was naive to purchase those materials, only using them a handful of times during the semester.

At first, I wondered who was more at fault, the professors for requiring a material that was then used minimally, or the bookstore, for charging expensive prices for products I wouldn’t touch. The solution became more clear the more I examined the dilemma: universities should provide required textbooks to students free of additional charge.

The market value of the global digital educational publishing market is projected to reach $41.5 billion by 2031 per Allied Market Research. Not only is the growth exponential, but the industry is able to continue to profit by printing new editions of textbooks every few years or bundling the books with software add-ons like Cengage or McGraw