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SOURCE: The Daily Tar Heel
01.24.07
EDITORIAL: ASG is fighting textbook prices
By: Derek Pantiel, UNCASG President
At the beginning of every semester, I walk into my student bookstore hoping to find that book prices have gone down. And every time I walk out disappointed as they seem to only have increased.
Semester after semester we as students experience the same thing as we put aside huge sums of our own money for textbooks.
We look to our administrators, our faculty and our bookstores to find a solution to this problem but in the end we only receive modest recommendations tailored to ruffle the least number of feathers.
This ends Friday.
This is the time for real solutions, the time to find answers to these egregious costs, the time to posit a tangible remedy that can create tangible results.
But how can we take others seriously when they suggest that students at UNC-Chapel Hill paid $177 on average for textbooks last spring when we know that textbooks for Chem 101 alone cost more than $200?
How can we take others seriously when students continue to lose money because book orders are turned in late, eliminating opportunities to acquire textbooks from used-book markets?
This is the time for real solutions. And we have one.
On Friday the UNC Association of Student Governments, an assembly of students from every school in the UNC system, will present the first unified student textbook proposal to the UNC Board of Governors. And I have to tell you, I'm excited.
I'm excited because this new proposal is innovative in nature. The central concept is a partial rental system - a system that would allow students to rent introductory course textbooks at a far lower cost than they can today.
The impetus behind this proposal is the success experienced by schools using full rental systems. The average student at Appalachian State University - with a full rental system - pays $209 per year for textbooks. The average student at ECU - with a purchase system similar to UNC-CH - pays between $700 and $950 per year after buybacks.
So why not a full rental system? For one, the initial capital investment is massive. Faculties also criticize it since they have to use the same book for two or three years, which they say infringes on their academic freedom.
And we agree, these are very good arguments against a full rental system.
A partial rental system, however, minimizes or erases these arguments altogether. Since the program will include only introductory classes, the capital investment is astronomically smaller; nowhere near the $50 million that some opponents claim a full rental system would cost.
Furthermore, since the material is introductory in nature and involves only a handful of classes, the academic freedom of our professors is hardly in jeopardy.
Now we don't pretend to have all of the answers but we have done our homework. We have spent countless hours researching a myriad of potential answers to the textbook problem. Still, we know there could be a better way.
And we would welcome one.
But until someone else steps up to the plate, we're going to continue to push this proposal. So join us in our efforts to lower the textbooks costs.
The fight is just beginning. Please join myself, ASG and your fellow students at the Board of Governors meeting in Greensboro on Feb. 9 as we come together to prove our discontent.
Our solution is at www.uncasg.org. Feel free to ask me any questions you might have at president@uncasg.org.
We rarely have the opportunity to do anything to create change, to find a solution. We do now.
Don't let it go to waste.
Derek Pantiel is an N.C. Central senior majoring in biology.
E-mail: president@Uncasg.org
