Syracuse University’s Student Association is in the beginning stages ofworking on an initiative to make textbooks more affordable for students.

SA Vice President Kyle Rosenblum said SA has heard complaints about textbook prices from various students. Particularly for low-income students, the price of textbooks can be detrimental to their education or can hinder them financially, Rosenblum said.

“(The initiative) should provide, ideally, different avenues for students to access those textbooks and purchase those textbooks,” SA Public Relations Co-chair Peter Choi said.

Choi said the initiative would also work to increase a textbook’s resale value when it’s sold back to the university.

Although it was on the legislative agenda at the beginning of this semester, the initiative was delayed because of other issues that required the association’s full attention, such as the recent assault along Ackerman Avenue, Choi said. He said SA plans to start focusing more on the issue in the upcoming weeks.

Rosenblum said SA has been collecting information to determine what the organization will focus on in the initiative.

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One option SA is exploring is how faculty can work to find more affordable textbook options for their classrooms, which includes making online copies or older editions more accessible, SA President Ghufran Salih said.

“I think professors need to be cognizant of the fact that some students can’t afford textbooks at the moment,” Salih said. “Some students have to wait to get their textbook because they’re looking for a cheaper alternative.”

Rosenblum said small mistakes that faculty may make when assigning a required textbook can be detrimental to students with financial limitations.

“For example, if a faculty member doesn’t decide what their textbook is until school starts, then the bookstore won’t have that as an option to rent, it won’t have it for free in the library and that makes it much more difficult for students with financial difficulties to access their textbooks,” Rosenblum said.

Salih said textbook affordability will be a long-term project for SA. Publishers are often wary of converting to online versions of textbooks because they make more money selling physical copies, she said.

“If we keep going with the same momentum that we have now, obviously after the shortcomings that we’ve been experiencing right now, I think that this is something that can be fully implemented,” Salih said.

She said textbooks could be made more affordable and accessible to students in five to seven years.

“There’s a wide variety of reasons that students sometimes won’t even purchase a textbook and won’t get the full academic experience that they’re paying to get,” Choi said. “We really want to encourage students to get the most out of their time here.”

Published on February 17, 2019 at 9:57 pm

Contact Hannah: hagraf@syr.edu