It’s getting to be that time of year when college students take a chunk of the money they’ve saved over the summer — or take out new loans — to buy a bunch of textbooks they’ll need for four months.
College textbooks are increasingly expensive. According to NBC News, the cost of a textbook has risen 1,041 percent from January 1977 to June 2015 — that’s more than three times the inflation rate. (People who make money selling these books dispute this analysis, as the above link points out.)
So why are they so expensive?
As the video above shows, it’s partially because these books are costly to produce. One estimate says a textbook can cost $3 million to make. It takes time to research, and can require an army of authors.
But it’s also because textbooks are required. In the case of book textbooks and prescription drugs, a doctor tells you want to buy, and you basically have to do it.
“They’ve been able to keep raising prices because students are ‘captive consumers.’ They have to buy whatever books they’re assigned,” Nicole Allen, a spokeswoman for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, told NBC.
That means textbook companies don’t have to price their products competitively.
But students aren’t actually spending that much.
Last year, college students spent about $638 on textbooks, even though the average cost of books and supplies at a public university is $1,225, according to NBC.
Forty percent of students polled in the National Association of College Stores fall 2013 survey said they rented at least one course material — a 100 percent increase from 2011.
According to a report from last year, 65 percent of students have opted to not buy a book at some point in their college careers because it cost too much.
