The Cost of College Texts Is One for the Books

Having three children ages 15 through 20, I read “College Textbook Prices Criticized” (Feb. 2) with great interest. For our oldest, who attends community college, we have been spending more on textbooks than tuition and fees. In effect, the publishing industry has grabbed the lion’s share of my family’s college budget. I would love to reverse this and contribute a much larger proportion to the local community college that endeavors to serve my community, yet struggles with budgetary constraints while the textbook publishing industry undoubtedly prospers.

In the aggregate, our state and counties operate an immense system of higher education that is heavily subsidized by our tax dollars, so I think the textbook problem could easily be solved by encouraging instructors at public colleges and universities to write textbooks and make them available on the Internet as files in the public domain. To encourage this, online textbooks should be taken into account in promotion and tenure decisions, alongside scholarly publications and teaching. The more widely used an instructor’s textbooks, the more credit the instructor receives.

David Mason

Culver City

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As a senior with only nine classes to complete, I dropped out of Cal State Northridge because I could no longer afford to continue. Textbooks were difficult to pay for, and instructors added to the problem by refusing to cooperate with each other over which texts would be used from one semester to the next.

The subject of textbook use needs further study, especially in the field of early childhood math, where it is questionable if textbooks are needed at all. Is the greatly superior curriculum of Kumon Math (no textbooks used) being swept under the rug because it threatens math instructors and the profits of booksellers? Maybe teachers unions and special interest groups are better focused on their paychecks than children’s futures.

Frank Dookun

Reseda