This year has been momentous for my family and me, as our twin boys graduated high school and started college. These are exciting milestones for any family.
For me, having worked in higher education technology for over two decades, there is a noteworthy twist. I’m now encountering higher education in a new capacity, not as a student or as a technology provider, but as a parent of students who are navigating higher education systems and experiences for the first time. And I’m all too familiar with one of the common pitfalls of this new-to-college onramp: the textbook affordability crisis.
My boys have chosen distinct pathways to begin their college careers. Will was eager for the immersive first-year experience of moving away, attending a four-year university, and living on campus as a full-time student at Oregon State University (OSU). A friend’s college-attending daughter recently described this as, “adulthood with training wheels.”
Nate, on the other hand, was more circumspect about how much change (and expense) he was ready to take on with the transition to college. He preferred to remain living at home while starting the next chapter of his education at our local Portland Community College (PCC). He is now in his second quarter of earning a two-year transfer degree.
From my vantage point as a parent, I’ve seen how each institution has reached out to its new incoming students to orient them and guide them through academic advising, selecting courses and building a reasonable schedule, matriculation, and starting classes. Overall I’ve been pleased.
The Textbook Cost Problem
There is a moment I have been anticipating on this college parent journey: the moment my sons tell me the cost of their required textbooks for the quarter.
Why that moment? For over a decade, my work has centered around tools that provide affordable learning materials for students, first at Lumen Learning and now at Pressbooks. The cost of textbooks is a bogeyman that catches many college students by surprise. For new-to-college learners, it can mean making a savvy consumer decision about whether a book is absolutely necessary and how they might get by without purchasing it. For cash-strapped students, it can be an unplanned-for expense that forces a difficult choice between buying books vs. paying for rent, groceries, or other family necessities.
Fortunately for my sons, the decision about whether to buy textbooks isn’t a weighty or excruciating economic trade-off. We have the funds.
But for me, this is a bit of a moment of reckoning for my life’s work
Background on the Textbook Affordability Crisis in the U.S.
Since the 1970s, the cost of textbooks and course materials in the U.S. has increased at three times the rate of inflation. In 2023, the average cost of textbooks was $1,212 a year for 4-year institutions and $1,463 for 2-year institutions.
Though there has been some budgetary relief for students through the evolution of textbook pricing models (e.g. rentals), ebooks, and open educational resources, textbook affordability continues to be a struggle as tuition and the cost of living soar.
2024 Data from The Education Data Initiative revealed that 65% of students polled did not buy textbooks because of high prices, and 25% chose to skip essential expenses, like food, or take up extra shifts at work to cover textbook costs.
The Silver Lining
Thankfully, some legislative and cultural shifts have recognized the importance of affordable learning materials.
Some of these include the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act curbing exploitative publisher practices, the establishment of statewide open educational resource programs in Washington (2011) and California (2012), the 2013 introduction of federal open textbook grant legislation, and the over $50 million in U.S. federal budget allocation for online educational resources, awarded through the Open Textbooks Pilot grant program between 2018 and 2024.
Some highlights
These advancements in affordability initiatives and a focus on open educational resources have led to some impressive results for students:
Sources:
https://studentpirgs.org/2023/02/22/open-textbooks-report/
https://studentpirgs.org/campaigns/make-textbooks-affordable/
https://studentpirgs.org/2023/02/22/open-textbooks-report/
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-textbooks#:~:text=Hard%20copy%20books%20can%20cost,in%20the%20past%2020%20years
https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%202023%20Updated.pdf
https://sparcopen.org/news/2018/1-billion-in-savings-through-open-educational-resources/
Revolution and Reckoning
When I began working in learning technology, inflation in the cost of college textbooks was outpacing many other categories, including healthcare. Virtually everyone who has ever attended college in the US has a horror story about particularly pricey books or access codes. ($400-dollar quantitative methods textbooks, anyone?) I recall being surprised when my first-year, first-semester textbooks rang up to over $500 at the BYU bookstore, even with a couple of gritty-looking used books in the mix. And that was more years ago than I care to count.
In the intervening years, I’ve had the privilege of being part of a vibrant revolution happening in the realm of learning materials, centered around open education. Because the internet makes it possible to share information with anyone around the world for essentially no cost, there is tremendous potential to lower or even eliminate the cost of learning materials. Open education is a global movement to create and share learning materials freely, using licenses that grant permissions for people to reshare, adapt, and remix these resources.
When I started working in this area, it was a fringy, futuristic dream to replace traditional (read: expensive) textbooks with open educational resources (OER). Today it is a standard, accepted practice especially in introductory college subjects. My current employer, Pressbooks, supports 10,000+ instructors and content creators at 500+ colleges and universities. These creators have produced many thousands of open-access digital textbooks and learning materials. Both my sons’ institutions, OSU and PCC, are among the educational institutions we serve. Pressbooks is one part of a broader ecosystem powering this movement towards affordability and access to learning materials.
So that brings us back to my moment of truth. After a decade working in and around the open education space, I was anxious to see whether this life’s work would result in a tangible benefit for my college students. What would their textbook bills be?
Cue the Drumroll
I was relieved when Nate, attending PCC, informed me his full-time schedule for his first term required just one e-textbook, priced at $58 in the bookstore. Now heading into his second term, his textbooks costs are again just $58, totalling $116 for two quarters. Pretty impressive.
Will chose to take fall classes at OSU as well as nearby Lane Community College. Across his full-time schedule at both colleges, there was just one e-textbook+courseware package required for the first term, at the cost of $90 in the university bookstore. For his second term, the textbook bill bumped up to $123.25.
That’s a whopping total of $329.25 for two college freshmen over two quarters. It’s far better than I had expected. Compared to my freshman year experience, it’s a bargain.
But my proudest moment came one evening two weeks into their first term when we were relaxing in our family room. Nate looked up from his laptop and said, “Mom, today we started using the e-book for my Cultural Foods class, and it’s from Pressbooks!”
It turns out PCC is using an OER textbook originally published by eCampusOntario, one of Pressbooks’ largest and most prolific clients: Food Studies: Matter, Meaning, Movement by David Szanto, Amanda Di Battista, and Irena Knezevic. It is heartwarming to see my son enthusiastically using a tool my company provides to access learning materials that are available at no cost to students and their families. And It is heartwarming to see PCC instructors in Oregon teaching with high quality OER textbooks created by educators in Ontario, Canada.
Fast forward to second term and an evening earlier this week. Sitting on our family room sofa, Nate leaned over to show me the attribution for his Speech & Communications textbook. Although the textbook has been rebuilt in PCC’s Brightspace course shell, the original content comes from an OER textbook, Principles of Public Speaking, published by my former employer, Lumen Learning, and authored by two dynamic professors from Washington community colleges, Christie Fierro and Brent Adrian.
All this provides sweet validation that this work of open education IS making a difference in tangible, meaningful ways. Including right under my own roof.
If you’d like to take your own journey into open access textbooks, it’s easy to do. Visit the Pressbooks Directory, a free catalog that includes 7,500+ open access books on many subjects, published by hundreds of organizations and thousands of authors from around the world.