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St. Cloud State University
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Rentals reduce high book costs
By Cathy Kropp
Published:
Monday, February 3, 2003
Cathy Kropp -- Staff Column
Something tells me that I'm not the only one crossing my fingers for some extra hours at work this week.
The short-lived relief of receiving my financial aid check has disappeared and reality has set in. Those pesky bills keep coming, with a huge one this month for textbooks.
I was hit again this semester with approximately $300 in textbook costs, over $150 of that for one class alone. And if past trends continue, I expect to get next to nothing for my nearly perfect textbooks when I return them to the stores.
Our school needs to look into some other options.
One idea that is worth checking out is the book rental program that is growing in popularity in Wisconsin and Illinois.
The concept is easy enough to grasp. Students pay a set fee that is included in their tuition and then borrow the books they need. The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse runs a similar program with a book fee of $65 per semester.
Another variation is one in which the price for all textbooks stays at a flat rate. Rend Lake College in Illinois charges $42 per class. Nearly half of this is a deposit fee, which is refunded to the student upon return of the textbook.
The savings really do add up. A cost comparison study of textbook purchase versus textbook rental at Rend Lake College found that after the deposit fee refund, a typical student there saved over $270 a year. A four-year student would then ultimately save over $1000.
The programs are also very flexible in other areas. Most allow students to purchase any textbooks they wish and return books without additional cost if they drop the class.
UW-La Crosse even allows students to borrow textbooks for short periods of time for reference or research purposes.
However, this rental program is not the perfect solution.
Most of the rental programs require the professors to use the same textbook for anywhere from two to five years. Some professors feel constrained by these limitations on book rotation.
Others voice concern with how these limits would affect classes in rapidly changing fields like computer science.
To solve this problem, many colleges that have implemented the rental program have limited the rotation of books with longer shelf lives like literature and math and devoted more money to books for technology-based classes. Where some important additional material is needed before a book is due for replacement, professors can put together a packet to go with the texts.
Implementing a program such as this would take a lot of time and research, and other options need to be considered as well. But SCSU needs to do something about the escalating cost of textbooks here. Rental might just be the answer.
