Alison Yang

Fifty-nine percent of student respondents spent upwards of $150 on textbooks for the upcoming year and 29% of students spent over $300. The lack of value that students find in some textbooks, however, invalidates their price. 

Scanning the MBS online bookstore for the school year’s course materials, one word jumps off the screen: REQUIRED. The bright red font and all-caps letters precede each title. You check the box labeled: “Add to cart,” watching the price total climb higher with each additional item. When the package arrives, you organize each textbook neatly on your shelf. As the school year progresses, the same books lie untouched, their freshly printed pages gathering dust.

Students acquire new textbooks each year, only to discover that a significant number of them are nonessential. According to a Harker Aquila Instagram poll, 82% of 109 polled Harker high school students used fewer than half of their textbooks more than once a week, with 48% of students using fewer than a quarter of their required materials. Furthermore, 93% of respondents purchased textbooks that they never used over the school year. 

This underutilization of course materials leads students to question their steep cost. Fifty-nine percent of student respondents spent upwards of $150 on textbooks for the upcoming year and 29% of students spent over $300. The lack of value that students find in some textbooks, however, invalidates their price. 

The excessive cost of textbooks also causes students to turn to other means of acquiring their required books, including illegal piracy. Twenty-six percent of poll respondents sourced pirated versions, compromising their integrity as well as their cybersecurity, rather than spending upwards of hundreds of dollars on textbooks. Even if students source their textbooks from trustworthy online marketplaces, buying class texts only to underutilize them is wasteful.

To solve this issue, teachers can send out a poll at the end of the year asking whether students found their textbooks useful and reevaluate their material lists. Based on the responses, certain texts can be marked as optional resources rather than required on the MBS online bookstore.  This way, students will be aware of which textbooks are not explicitly used during the school year. Those who want to use the textbook as an additional resource can do so knowing the benefits and trade-offs. If the material is intended merely as a supplement to the course, teachers can find online study resources that are freely available and supply those instead.  

A voluntary textbook swap at the end of the year could help address the waste. Ninety percent of students polled expressed that they would be willing to recycle their textbooks at the end of the year for others to use. Eighteen percent of polled students responded that they receive textbooks passed down from friends and family members. Organizing an exchange throughout the school would make this a more widely popular option, allowing more of the student body to access this system.

Textbooks remain a cornerstone of many curricula. With proactive involvement from the community to evaluate and share academic resources, we can ensure that students only invest in materials that genuinely enhance learning instead of merely acting as burdensome expenses.