EDITORIAL – Pitt should implement textbook rental system

If Pitt made the decision to emulate Eastern Illinois University’s textbook rental program,… If Pitt made the decision to emulate Eastern Illinois University’s textbook rental program, the cost would be high – but the payoff would be even higher.

Eastern Illinois’ program – one of 25 textbook rental programs implemented at universities around the country – is fairly simple: A portion of the regular tuition and fees that each student pays at the beginning of the term goes toward “textbook rental,” a service in which participating students rent copies of textbooks that they return at the end of the semester.

Fines up to $10 are incurred if a book is returned late or damaged at the end of the term.

Eastern Illinois’ program, which has been in place as long as the University has, has saved thousands of students hundreds of dollars every semester. And while EIU’s textbook budget per semester is rather costly – $2 million per fiscal year – its administrators feel that the expense is a necessary benefit for students.

At a university the size of Pitt, the startup price would be even more costly. The price of implementing the program at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, a campus of about 20,000 students (similar to the size of Pitt), was estimated at $12 million, according to the Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s daily student newspaper.

But the payoff would be huge. Aside from tuition and living expenses, purchasing textbooks is one of the biggest expenses for college students, particularly when loans and financial aid are sometimes restricted to tuition and room and board.

We pay the University thousands of dollars – that’s $12,876 for in-state students and $22,386 for out-of-state students, to be exact – in tuition and fees every year. How hard would it be for them to reallocate some of that money back to us? We’ll even sacrifice a few firework shows and tricked-out computer labs if that’s what it takes.

Beside the price of implementation, the program poses no real negatives. In fact, it might actually clue universities in to the unbelievably overpriced market of textbook sales.

In order to control their own costs, with a system like this in place, universities could limit the price that professors ask them to pay in books or put restrictions on how often professors can switch to a new edition of a textbook.

The system would also put a check on textbook companies. If a major university refuses to buy thousands of copies of textbooks, it would provide the publishers with an incentive to lower prices.

Ultimately, there will be students who want to buy their own textbooks – and that’s understandable. We’re not in high school anymore – there are some books we want to keep, or that might be useful later on. But, particularly for classes students take as electives, there should be the option to return the book and not lose almost half of its original value.

While we’d love it if Pitt created a program identical to EIU’s, we’d even take a partial book rental service in which the University rented out books that cost $100 or more every semester.

We encourage Pitt to investigate the feasibility of implementing a textbook rental program – a cause we’re pretty sure the entire student body could get behind.