A federal advisory panel studying the high cost of college texts was offered a simple suggestion Monday for keeping down expenses: Don't use so many books.
Or, at least, not books in the conventional sense. The idea is to prod professors to develop more courses that take advantage of articles, lecture notes, study guides and other materials available for free on the Internet.
That suggestion, and several others, were aired during a 3 1/2-hour meeting in Santa Clarita, where the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance heard from college administrators, textbook publishers and other higher education leaders and advocates.
The meeting -- the second of three field hearings the panel will hold around the country before it delivers a congressionally requested report in May -- didn't produce any consensus solutions. And neither did it answer a question that seemed to be a subtext of the proceedings: Who is to blame for textbooks that often cost more than $100?
Those costs have increasingly drawn attention from state and federal lawmakers over the last three years, prompted in part by student activists. The effort gained support in 2005 when the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that college textbook prices have climbed at twice the rate of inflation over the last two decades.
Students activists and their allies have largely blamed publishers for the phenomenon. They have pointed to such practices as issuing unnecessary new editions and bundling texts with additional, often unwanted, instructional materials such as CD-ROMs.
Many of the participants in Monday's session, held at College of the Canyons, agreed that those practices are part of the problem. Among the solutions proposed were a variety of measures already in place at some campuses, including providing students with the option of renting books, as well as encouraging professors to change their required textbooks less frequently so that students have more opportunity to buy cheaper used volumes.
In addition, some officials suggested stepped-up funding of scholarships and other financial aid designed to help pay for books.
