Milestones: An innovative solution to overpriced textbooks

Money for nothing

You may remember the feeling: You sign up for a course you’re really excited to take. Then you look at the syllabus: The textbook costs $100. Or maybe $200 or $300. If you’re a more recent college grad, you may remember a course’s online materials being locked behind an expensive paywall. Or having to pay extra for “recommended” supplemental materials.

The irony is the textbook contains hardly any new content: only enough to “justify” the hefty price of a new edition.

Enter the Student PIRGs. Decades ago, PIRG student volunteers and interns organized book exchanges, allowing students to buy and sell their used textbooks. Over time, students begin to advocate more innovative solutions, including Open Educational Resources (OERs) — open-license learning materials freely available on the web.

Exposing publishers’ unfair publishing practices

Pearson, Cengage, Wiley, McGraw-Hill. Students know these major textbook publishing companies all too well. These four firms alone control more than 80% of the market.

The lack of competition allows the publishers to get away with a number of unreasonable price-hiking practices, including:

• Publishing new editions of their textbooks every few years, even for subjects such as calculus and history, where the material is well-established and new editions differ little from past publications.

• Bundling textbooks with access codes for supplemental online materials. This diminishes the resale value of the book itself once the access code expires.

• Pushing “automatic billing,” whereby students are automatically charged on their tuition bill for course materials, with no easy way to opt out or shop around for cheaper alternatives.

It’s no wonder that, over 40 years the price of textbooks increases three times faster than inflation.

Toward free and open textbooks

These prices keep rising even as people can access nearly the sum total of human knowledge instantly on the internet — a fact that makes “open textbooks” a new opportunity to make prices more reasonable .

Open textbooks turn the traditional publishing model on its head. In direct contrast to traditional publishers that strictly control every facet of access and use of their textbooks and materials, open textbooks are available for free online, are free to download, and are affordable in print. Open textbooks and all OER material are published under an “open” license, allowing free and unfettered public use.

In 2003, PIRG students begin to persuade administrators to spend money and time to train and incentivize faculty to adopt open textbooks and other openly licensed materials for their classroom teaching. Starting at the University of California at Irvine, PIRG chapters bring the campaign to UMass Amherst, the University of Maryland, and Rutgers University, among other schools, winning approval for programs that save students millions of dollars.

Dave Rosenfeld helps put the campaign on the national stage. In 2007, Dave is the national program director for the Student PIRGs when a comprehensive federal report confirms the research on barriers to textbook affordability that he and the Student PIRGs had been conducting for years.

In 2011, student organizer Nicole Allen coordinates a “textbook rebellion” at Indiana University. Students are eager to stop and sign Nicole’s petition protesting high textbook fees — and the event helps drive the adoption of e-textbooks in more classrooms across the IU campus.

The Student PIRGs’ Make Textbooks Affordable campaign keeps winning: Convincing Congress to launch a pilot program that could save students $50 million per year; working with a coalition of student government leaders to get the U.S. Department of Justice to block a merger between two leading textbook publishers; and helping campuses across the country implement “course marking,” which allows students to see the full cost of all the materials for their classes before signing up.

Amplifying the student voice

As students speak up for open textbooks, the Student PIRGs also promote other solutions to control the cost of higher education. In 2018, for example, our #PellRaiser campaign helps stop congressional cuts to the Pell Grant program, which provides tuition assistance to millions of students every year.