By Brooke Lynch
It should come as no surprise to any college student to hear that textbooks are expensive. The often mandatory cost of the books students use has been increasing at a staggering three times the inflation rate since around the 1970s. This rate would be alarming on it’s own, but then COVID-19 happened. The United States Public Interest Group (or U.S. PIRG for short) polled 5,000 students on their experience and found that in the Fall of 2020, 65% of students skipped buying textbooks, despite the fact that 90% of them worried what effect it would have on their grades. The survey reported that 20% of the students who were surveyed, lost their jobs, and 79% had their ability to get access to basic needs affected by COVID-19. With the economic downturn and the fact that youth unemployment has doubled since 2019, it’s not hard to imagine why students are skipping out on textbooks: they can’t afford them.
When COVID-19 hit, educators scrambled to make school as safe as possible, with many of them moving to online courses. And with that, some companies helped students out by waiving fees for things like textbooks and online access to course materials in the later months of the spring. But when summer rolled around and COVID had not left, these companies moved their prices back and students were left again with staggering prices.
The same group of students that was surveyed on their textbooks was also asked about access codes. Access codes are often essential for completing schoolwork as things such as tests, homework, and study guides are placed behind these codes. But the group still reported that 21% of students skipped some of these codes, knowing the direct effect it would have on their grades. The percent of students skipping access codes is even higher, 38%, among the one in ten students who had to skip meals to cut costs during the pandemic, which is nearly twice the rate of their peers. The one in ten statistic is even known to be the conservative estimate on how many students are facing food insecurity, meaning there are potentially many more students who have to choose between prioritizing health and school. “Considering the scale of the student debt crisis and the long-term upward trend in tuition costs, this situation is more than a shame—it’s an urgent problem colleges and universities must solve if they want to improve student success and help students graduate,” says U.S. PIRG’s Affordable Textbook Campaign Director Cailyn Nagle.
So what can be done? Well U.S. PIRG has some ideas. Firstly, they believe that legislators and education agencies should provide funding to help get the cost of textbooks and education resources down, and preferably make them free. They want to see programs such as the California Community College’s Zero-Textbook-Cost degree program, which allows students to get an associates degree without the cost of textbooks, expanded across the nation. COVID-19 is expected to continue a trend of funding towards higher education being cut that started back in the Great Recession, which will certainly leave students to bear the burden of the cost to their higher education. But if states begin funding these costs, then potentially congress will begin a program that focuses on paying for higher education, and students won’t have to choose between food and education.
It’s also important that people have access to the internet for their higher education. One in ten of the students surveyed said that they did not have internet access, and those students were 9% more likely to skip classes and 8% more likely to fail classes because they could not afford course material. This is why the U.S. PIRG also supports elected officials putting funding into closing internet service gaps for all.
The higher education institutions themselves should also play a part in this reform. It is their responsibility, according to the U.S. PIRG, to continue things such as support grants, tech support, and course release, to make it easier for professors to adopt open textbooks and release their work under open license. Price transparency is a way to help students, allowing students to know the full cost up front instead of after getting into the course. Creating spaces where students can easily access the internet is also important for students to get internet, both during COVID and after. But not just with the internet, schools need to be establishing services that support their students basic needs, such as the food bank here at Evergreen.
The rising cost of textbooks isn’t an isolated issue. It represents the larger way in which higher education is often behind a paywall that asks a lot financially of its students. And with most jobs nowadays requiring some form of higher education and a global pandemic hurting the economy and people’s ability to afford their needs, it may be time to re-evaluate the system. Because if America truly is the land of opportunity where you can be whatever you want, we should be giving people the means to achieve what they want.
