Illinois Senator calls for fair textbook prices
Durbin visits UIS, urges student, faculty collaboration
September 10, 2008
By Armando Vega
Staff Writer
Illinois Senator Dick Durbin visited the UIS campus on Sept. 3 in order to address an issue facing college students across the nation-- textbook affordability. The provisions Durbin has introduced into the Higher Education Act, recently passed by the Congress and signed into law by the President, will take effect July 2010.
UIS students Charles Olivier, Ashley Rook, and Randy Knuppel pose with Senator Dick Durbin during his visit to campus on September 3, 2008. |
The three main provisions of the bill would mandate: full disclosure by professors of the cost of college textbooks for their courses (presumably to be listed on course catalogs), disclosure of the ISBN number to give students the capacity to search for the required text in venues other than the school’s own bookstore, and the unbundling of supplemental material such as CDs by publishers to reduce the cost for students. Updated supplementary material could then be purchased on a separate and individual basis.
In his remarks, Durbin made note that as, of 2003, college students could be expected to pay around $900 a year, on average,on textbooks alone.
SGA President Ashley Rook mentioned that some students avoid needed courses sheerly due to the untenable cost of the textbooks. Others would switch their desired major to one with less expensive books, and still some students would enroll in the class while forgoing the textbook— surviving by way of relying solely on Powerpoint presentations hosted on Blackboard or borrowing classmates’ books.
Charles Olivier, also a member of the Student Government Association, humorously spoke of his freshman year when he realized the school was not just going to give him his needed textbooks and that he would need to pay an additional $700 for his first semester alone, requiring a phone call to his mother who’d already strained the family’s finances to pay tuition, housing, fees, and move-in expenses. Dropping a class to decrease the costs would have resulted in less than full-time status as a student and so a forbearance of federal financial aid.
After hearing student perspectives, Durbin once more took to the stage and noted that at Eastern Illinois University there was a rental program in place which dramatically reduces the textbook costs for students there and suggested that UIS could do the same with the proper initial investment. Chancellor Ringeisen dismissed the call, citing the two-million dollar expense such an investment would entail. He also went on to clarify that the selection process of textbooks rests entirely with faculty, in collaboration with the Deans of their respective departments, with no additional oversight by the university itself, and noted the university’s partnership with Follet, a major national distributor of textbooks.
According to Durbin, students have a chance to weigh in on the subject of textbook affordability, by meeting with faculty to collaborate on the textbook selection process taking place this October for the spring semester.
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