Between Books and Necessities

Students on financial aid at Harvard are expected to spend less than $2,750 a year on living expenses—and it costs about half of that to pay for a year’s worth of books. Even worse is that it requires a substantial amount of money, a lump sum of over $600 at the beginning of each semester, to buy books for classes.

Coming up with that amount of money in a short period of time is difficult for even the most well-off. It’s no wonder that students often choose not to buy their books at all, or avoid the courses with particularly high costs. Many choose, instead, to rely on the Harvard library system to have the necessary books on reserve, only to find them checked out when major assignments or exams are around the corner. It is a shame that at the world’s premier educational institution, some students don’t have access to the books they need and are forced to choose their classes based on the cost of course literature.

Several solutions have been proposed as a way to resolve this embarrassment, but the Course-Cost Assistance Program (C-CAP) is the best step toward treating high book costs like the academic impediment that they are. C-CAP would grant stipends to low-income students for their course books. However, in a fall meeting with student representatives from the Undergraduate Council (UC) and the Students Taking on Poverty (STOP) Campaign, a financial aid officer said that the administration was hesitant to take on something like C-CAP for fear of giving donors the impression that Harvard students don’t have enough money for books.

Yet the best way to tackle this problem is not to avoid the issue at hand, but to raise money to provide direct funding of students’ book purchases. Some have proposed simply augmenting the expenses section of the financial aid package, and letting low-income students decide what to do with extra money. That is outrageous for an institution whose first priority should be the education of its students. People should not have to choose between books for their classes and the other costs that inevitably arise at school.

Still others have suggested augmenting the libraries’ reserves, but that isn’t a cost-effective solution either. According to a 2005 study by the Financial Aid Office (FAO), to add only three additional copies of each book and coursepack to the reserves would cost, on average, $360 per class, or approximately $40,000 for the Government department alone. Multiply these costs across departments and increasing the reserves system could cost close to a million dollars. And students would probably still have trouble finding their books during crunch time.

There are important initiatives that will help defray the costs of coursework, like putting needlessly expensive coursepacks online, and giving students the tools to purchase the cheapest books at locations other than the COOP. But it’s only an initiative like C-CAP that is going to assist the students dealing with the worst financial hardship, some of whom use their work-study money not just for themselves but to send home to their families.

C-CAP isn’t just a dream concocted by naïve students. Thanks to the leadership of Chaz M. Beasley ‘08 and Amadi P. Anene ’08, almost all the logistical barriers in C-CAP’s implementation have been removed. After a careful study, they came up with the best possible program to tackle the problem of high book costs in the form of stipends for low-income students. They have found a way to implement it that insures the discretion of these students. They have even secured a good deal of the funding, bringing the price tag for its implementation down from $200,000 to $100,000 per year. The dominoes are all in place—we just need the Harvard community to knock them down.

For only about $100,000 from private donors and the FAO on an annual basis, C-CAP can provide $125 stipends for students whose families make under $40,000 a year and $75 stipends for students whose families make under $60,000 a year, affecting almost one-sixth of the Harvard undergraduate student population. These stipends aren’t enough, but they are a big step in the right direction. Their delivery to students will finally demonstrate the treatment of books as an academic necessity, rather than us just another undergraduate commodity.

Kyle A. de Beausset ’08-’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is an environmental science and public policy concentrator in Leverett House. Kedamai Fisseha ‘09 is an economics concentrator in Cabot House. They are the Co-Directors of the Students Taking On Poverty (STOP) Campaign.