terrapinsanity.com

Responding to parents who cried “we’ve got to do something about the cost of college textbooks!”,
Maryland’s General Assembly will drive the costs up.

The legislature enacted Senate Bill 183 (also the cross-filed House Bill 85) by wide margins. Universities must now require each faculty member and instructor to extensively review and certify that he or she is cognizant of the hardships imposed by the rising cost of books. The campus must track and report each sign-off, publish textbook selections in a timely way and follow a host of other bureaucratic obligations.

How might this save money? There is some presumption that knowing book choices further in advance might let students find alternate and cheaper sources, or for book-sellers to buy enough for discounts. Maybe faculty will let themselves be browbeat into using different or fewer materials.

But at the end of the day, the law crashes into a few hard realities. The first: in the advanced world we work in there are just not a lot of sources for materials. Maybe there is a robust high school market for books, where the same content is presented umpteen different ways, so competition could theoretically drive that cost down. (It hasn’t even there, of course.) But this isn’t high school. At the cutting edge, we’re lucky to have content written down even once. The cost on a sole source will be what it’s going to be, and faculty have no control over it.

Second, the chief cost in all this is publication. Have you looked at the price of print media anywhere? How about just for a newspaper? Costs are up, and even for books on highly precedented topics (yet another expose on Shakespeare for example) there isn’t the volume of demand as for a Ludlam novel. Publication of advanced material is expensive, and no law passed by the General Assembly is going to change that.

And finally, while this may be the first shot across the bow of intellectual freedom on campus, we’re not yet required to use only materials mandated by the legislature. Under the new law, faculty can still select what we are going to select, and let’s recognize, the vast majority of us already do so in a timely fashion without gratuitous changes from term to term – all without being told to do so by legislators.

So at the end of the day, we’ll still use the same books, the market won’t change, publication costs won’t go down …. but we will have 1,500 professors and uncounted number more instructors obligated to kill more time certifying book selections to an expensive new computer system run by expensive staff, to make reports that the state will have to hire staff to read.

Next time there is a discussion about rising tuition rates, someone needs to make note of this case study in “why”.