Each year, college students face the matter of textbook fees. With everything else students have to pay for, the cost of textbooks (whether they’re required or not) only adds to their burden, as tuition increases. Rumor has it that the price of textbooks might be going down.

"Yes, it’s true," said Jake Hamberg, ASUAF."It’s the issue we seem to be hearing the most from students." It’s especially difficult for freshman, he said, and stresses the importance of finding a solution to the high cost of textbooks at the university.

"One student approached me saying that she had spent $600 on textbooks and had not even finished purchasing all the books for her classes." More importantly, Hamberg believes that "expensive textbooks discourage students from taking on an ambitious course load. Some students do actually factor in textbook prices into their tuition and so recognize that they must take a light course load. This discourages a student from being able to graduate in four years."

Currently, the student council is discussing this matter with the governance coordinating committee. They are considering the possibility of a joint committee on textbook cost reduction and are attempting to locate the greatest contributors to high-price textbooks. Hamberg states that staff and faculty recognize that there is a problem and they are willing to "help find and implement a solution."

"There’s no option to say whenever a book is required or not. We’re trying to make it so that students can be aware of if a book is necessary [for class]. There is some accountability of the faculty for textbooks we don’t really need."

The student government is also conferring this issue with President Hamilton of the coalition of student leaders and is looking into schools that have previously experienced success in lowering the price of textbooks. An example of such a school is the Kenai River Campus in Soldotna, which had "worked to encourage faculty to pay close attention to the books they are ordering." In other words, they double-checked their ordering sites and found publishers such as Dover Thrift Publishing that reduces the price of textbooks.

As far as ASUAF goes, Hamberg says that ASUAF has come up with a few solutions: An online book swap, which will take place on a new site they’re building, called ASUAF.org. Students are also being asked to "indicate clearly in their course evaluations whether or not the textbook is truly necessary."

Another solution is a guaranteed buy-back program, which identifies which texts the campus bookstore will buy back and guarantee a buy-back price if faculty book selection is unknown. ASUAF is also hoping to make books that cost more than $100 available on reserve at the campus library. The last solution is digital textbooks.

Kayt Sunwood, Staff Council President, states, "We’re hoping to work together to make textbooks more affordable." She says that an “unavoidable amount of students” had complained about text cost and that one of their goals is to make used textbooks more available.

"Jake [Hamberg] presented us with a summary of the price of textbooks, and we’ve yet to decide what we can do about it, though we’re definitely in agreement [about lowering the cost]," she says. "We need to be getting out to the students what their options are." She states that the committee is, among other things, working with the library to figure out what technology could do for them.

When asked to estimate how soon the committees could implement their solutions to the lowering of textbook cost, she said, "We hope to make this happen as soon as possible. I wish we could just wave a magic wand and make it happen, but we can’t, so we’re just doing our best."

Hamberg said, "There are solutions that can be implemented right here at UAF. ASUAF is going to help make text books affordable for students."