Textbook prices have gone up a whopping 1,041 percent since 1977

(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

published 4 August 2015

Walk into any college bookstore and you'll likely get sticker shock, considering college textbook prices have gone up an astonishing 1,041 percent since 1977.

NBC News looked at data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and found that from January 1977 to June 2015, textbook prices have risen more than three times the rate of inflation. Experts say textbooks are being sold the same way pharmaceuticals are — like sales reps visit doctors, publishers are making trips to campus to woo professors. "They've been able to keep raising prices because students are 'captive consumers,'" Nicole Allen, spokeswoman for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said. "They have to buy whatever books they're assigned."

Publishers and college bookstore managers who spoke with NBC News say this isn't true, and argue that the study didn't look at used or rented books and didn't take into account "the law of small numbers," meaning an increase of $100 to $200 appears as a 100 percent increase, while a tuition increase from $10,000 to $11,000 is only 10 percent. Mark Perry, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan (where one specialized chemistry textbook is on sale for $400), has been studying the rising costs of textbooks for several years, and said that one thing is certain: "College textbook prices are increasing way more than parents' ability to pay for them."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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