Anyone who has browsed through Amazon for textbooks may already know that there is a discrepancy between the prices listed online and those listed in the School Store. Students such as Dani Zanuttini-Frank ’18 have been able to buy all their textbooks for half the price of the School Store’s using online retailers. To address the problem of overpriced textbooks in the School Store, Fifth Form President Noah Hermes de Boor ’18 will be starting a school-wide petition either after Long Weekend or right at the beginning of winter term.
Hermes de Boor said, “The three big points in the petition are reevaluating our relationship with the School Store, seeing what we can do to make the textbooks a little more reasonably priced, and really making known the fact that students are able to return their textbooks after a week, because a lot of people don’t seem to know that you can do that once you find cheaper options online.”
He added, “I think is the most important thing for people to realize is that when you cut maybe $250 in textbooks for one person, it may not look like it changes a lot, but imagine what it would look like if you do that with every single person who is part of the 34% of the school who is on financial aid. That’s a huge impact. The amount of money we could save could be similar to the cost of tuition. It could be the difference between people being able and not able to come to Choate.”
The petition is currently going through an editing process. Hermes de Boor explained, “I have been working closely with a lot of people in the Student Council, especially Amir Idris ’17, head of the Student Life Committee, and Mr. Oliver Morris, one of the Student Council advisers. We’re still going through the editing process in order to make it as effective as possible.”
Hermes de Boor came up with this idea after listening to other students’ experiences of buying books from the School Store, as well as reflecting on his own. He recounted, “I was in $700 of debt last year for my textbooks. I couldn’t pay it back — $700 is a lot of money for most people.” He continued, “When I met with people in Financial Aid, I realized that financial aid does cover the cost of textbooks, although it’s not necessarily clear that it does that. That made me happy, but then I started thinking about how much money in financial aid was being wasted on paying for textbooks that are incredibly overpriced at the School Store.”
Before creating his petition, Hermes de Boor reached out to various members of the administration, including Mr. Matthew McDonald, Director of Financial Aid. Hermes de Boor said, “We talked about Mr. McDonald’s idea of finding a way to get textbooks more evenly distributed based on need, rather than having it first-come, first-serve. For example, the school could put aside used books so that people who come in for sports preseasons don’t necessarily get the first dibs on all of the used books, which really should be parceled out based on need.”
Hermes de Boor also talked to Director of Studies Mr. Kevin Rogers, the liaison between academic department heads and the School Store, to better understand how each academic department chooses its textbooks. Mr. Rogers explained, “Over the past few years, we have been on the lookout for other vendors that we could go to. The last time the department heads really took it up, we landed on the idea that one of the great things about having a bookstore on campus is the convenience and the immediacy of access. However, there have been various courses in the Science, English, and HPRSS Departments, that have moved to online texts, which tend to be cheaper. For instance, I know for the class I teach, our e-textbook is $23; the paper version is quite a bit more.”
Mr. McDonald added, “We are looking into several different options to make purchases, especially e-texts, more efficient for our students. The student experience is our priority, so we continually review our policies and procedures to make sure that we do this to the best of our ability.”
Mr. Daniel Cronin, Manager of the School Store, said, “We don’t want to have expensive textbooks here either, because when that happens, there’s very little that we can do to control it. Everybody just assumes that we’re the bad guys, but in a sense, that’s not how it works. It’s a much bigger picture than that.”
Mr. Cronin explained why textbooks found in the school store are generally more expensive that those found online. He said, “The only time we’re stuck having to sell textbooks that comparatively would be very expensive is when we would have to buy it new, as we have to sell it for the price that the publisher says we have to sell it for. Now, a lot of people will go on and look at online retailers like Amazon. That is really difficult for a store like ours to be able compete.” He continued.
The School Store has considered buying textbooks from these third-party sellers. However, “if we try to go and buy a couple of books here and there from third-party sellers, sometimes those books take longer to get here, sometimes they’re in bad shape, sometimes they’re in the wrong edition, and sometimes they don’t show up at all. It’ll make it difficult for us to make sure that we have enough books to fill a course enrollment on time for the start of the year.” However, “over the past few years, the cost of textbooks has gone down because of the buy-back policy.”
Mr. Cronin elaborated on the school’s buy-back policy. “For the most part, we have used books, which we try to get through buy-back from students at the end of the year. Although it’s not a full refund, it allows us to buy the books back cheaper, which in turn allows us to provide them cheaper to students in the fall.”
Hermes de Boor hopes to circulate the petition through all the dorms. He said, “I plan to circulate it in the same way that the students spearheading divestment did it — circulating it through the dorms with the help of prefects — which I thought was really brilliant. I think prefects, in general, would care about the cost of textbooks because it affects people who they care about. Also, I’m thinking of posting things in the Day Student Lounge and maybe sending things to advisers in senior dorms as well to make sure that we won’t miss any demographics. This issue affects everyone in the school — everyone should have a say in it.”
He concluded, “I think people, students, teachers, and administrators should be thinking of more creative ways to deal with the problems of expensive textbooks and the strain that it puts on financial aid.”
