Reading The Fine Print

Last fall, the Dean’s Office picked up the tab for coursepacks for eight visiting Tulane students. It seems that the College now understands what we have known all along: The price of coursepacks has spiraled out of control.

Allan Powell, general manager at the Coop, says that Harvard undergraduates have spent over $700,000 on coursepacks this year at the Coop alone. But don’t blame the distributors for high prices: After the Coop’s rebate, the profit margin on coursepacks is negligible.

Coursepacks are expensive because the copyright royalties for articles quickly add up. When you also factor in commercial printing costs, it’s not unusual for a coursepack to cost over $100—as we know all too well.

There is reason to be hopeful. Astonishingly, all 30 of the articles in the Ec10 coursepack this semester are available, for free, through the E-Resources on Harvard College Library (HCL) website. HCL uses income from our term-bill to help pay “upwards of $4 million” for subscriptions to 6,820 electronic resources, including databases that contain many of the same articles that are in our coursepacks!

Yes, you heard correctly: We’re paying twice for many articles. The winners here are the copyright holders. They get paid first from the library subscription, and then they get paid again—quite handsomely, it must be said—when we buy our printed coursepacks. It just doesn’t make sense.

Admittedly, it’s not difficult to understand how we ended up here. There’s very little incentive to keep the cost of coursepacks down. Let’s face it: Most professors don’t even know how much their coursepacks cost, so why should head teaching fellows slave to make them cheaper? Harvard students, or our parents, dutifully foot the bill for course materials without complaining. At the end of the day, we have no alternative but to cough up.

The good news is that change is simple and on the way. The Undergraduate Council is currently working with the Harvard College Dean’s Office and HCL to explore three strategies for reducing the cost of coursepacks.

For starters, professors and teaching staff should receive more guidance about how to use electronic resources effectively when compiling coursepacks.

Secondly, the Dean’s Office should work with HCL to establish a centralized system to ensure that departments are doing all that they can to utilize E-Resources to bring down the cost of coursepacks. At Columbia College Chicago, for example, teaching staff submit reading lists and librarians create a web page with links directly to the articles that are available electronically. Centralizing the search for articles is the only way to maximize the cost savings for students.

Finally, the College should embrace the future and move ahead with plans to make online coursepacks available this fall. Imagine if Harvard students, like students at Princeton, could download coursepacks as PDF files and print articles as required on their own printers.

And the future is not far away. If the College moves quickly to adopt these recommendations, then you should expect to be paying less for coursepacks as soon as next year. That means there will be more money in your pocket to pay for exorbitantly expensive textbooks—but that’s another story.



Tom D. Hadfield ’08, a Crimson editorial comper, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.