Passive resistance at the bookstore

The General Assembly can’t pay the state’s bills; so much so, that it came up with the brilliant idea of charging UNC-System students an extra $200 in tuition. The University administration and some self-righteous student leaders deemed students didn’t have adequate social lives and decided it would be in our best interest to spend millions on a student center renovation. Next year many students will have to spend hundreds of dollars on health care plans to meet the state’s minimum requirements.

The verdict is in: college costs are growing, and students at N.C. State are feeling the burden.

Unfortunately for students, most of college’s academic costs are completely unavoidable and out of students’ hands. The powers that be will continue to dictate tuition and student fee hikes at will and without reservation.

Why should they care? We’re only in the worst recession since the 1940s.

But alas, I’ve found a hole in their system. There is still one place where students have control over their expenditures.

Not on ABC store receipts or bar tabs, those are essential for sanity’s sake. But students can still control the amount they spend on textbooks.

At the start of the semester, I didn’t have enough money to pay for textbooks. By the third week of class -- when I still didn’t have the money -- I decided to boycott the entire system and see how long I could hold out.

We’re now in the 12th week of classes and I have to admit, it’s rather liberating. I don’t have the awful added weight of the textbooks in my bag and still have the $420 it would have cost me to buy textbooks this semester (based on new book prices, since I couldn’t find any of them used by the third week).

A Government Accountability Office report from 2005 revealed an interesting trend in college textbook prices. They grow, A LOT.

Overall price inflation -- on all market items -- from 1986 to 2005 was 72 percent. Textbook prices increased by 186 percent and tuition and fees grew by 240 percent over the same time period.

The discrepancy is incredible and yet no one can offer an explanation as to why the books are so expensive.

Publishers speak endlessly about the “unseen” costs of acquiring illustration rights, research and development and pre-production.

Professors allege they make no money either. Several I’ve spoken with in the past claimed they had to pay the publisher to produce their book and view the work as a form of public service.

And then there are the bookstores. They also maintain innocence, claiming the only profit they make goes toward paying their workers.

I’m just trying to figure out who the Madoff is in this scheme. Textbook prices continue to increase at 6 percent per year and no one is making money.

Meanwhile, I persevere without the textbooks I need to do homework assignments, study for tests and adequately research for projects.

I’ve resigned to the fact that I may have to purchase one textbook, as I have an open-book exam coming up later this month.

So far, though, I’m pretty happy with my decision to boycott textbooks. Most of them can be found electronically anyway -- not to say I would ever download a copy of a textbook or solutions manual.

Worst case, the bookstore has a seven-day return policy on textbooks during the semester. It’s almost like a built in rental service.

I’ll consider this a small victory on a campus that affords few for the fiscally mindful.