The cost of textbooks can be a prohibitive expense for going to college, a student's research report found.
“Textbook costs are a financial barrier to higher education that disproportionately affects minority, low-income, first-generation and food-insecure students,” Stockton University senior Jessie Nash wrote in the report published by the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University.
Replacing these expensive books with free educational resources could alleviate that problem, but more professors and administrators need to promote the option, according to Nash's research.
The Social Work major was awarded a Board of Trustees Fellowship for Distinguished Students for her work on this subject in May.
She is launching an online marketplace for used textbooks and other materials.
College text books and materials cost an average of $1,326 per student nationwide for the 2021-2022 year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Prices increased at three times the rate of inflation over the past 50 years, Nash reports. Textbook costs have increased by 7 percent since 2020, outpacing increases in tuition, fees and housing.
Open educational resources, or OER, include learning materials available for free.
They have the potential to improve educational equity, affordability and quality, the report states, adding that by adopting OER, colleges could significantly reduce or eliminate costs associated with traditional textbooks.
Such initiatives have provided students throughout the country with more than $1 billion in savings, estimates show.
Other research has indicated that affordable course materials have helped improve student achievement through better course grades, higher enrollment intensity, lower withdrawal rates and higher student satisfaction.
Educators can use OER to modify, customize and adapt the resources to their specific instructional needs and to regularly update the materials to keep pace with rapidly evolving advancements.
“Any initiative that can save students money and make a college education more accessible, without compromising the quality of that education, is a win,” Hughes Center Research Associate Alyssa Maurice said.
That is if those in education are aware of them.
Only about one in four faculty members knew of such initiatives, according to a recent national survey of college educators and administrators by Bay View Analytics. Less than half — or 43 percent — of administrators knew about them.
The results point to a greater need to spread the word about OER, Nash said.
Government policy plays a role in promoting the adoption of OER by increasing awareness of it and facilitating its use, the research paper states. New Jersey is one of 30 states that have enacted policies to encourage the use of OER. A 2019 state law requires institutions of higher education to develop an open textbook plan.
Stockton University’s OER program is administered through its library, which provides background about open resources, links to materials and other state and national initiatives. In fall 2022, Stockton started identifying which courses utilize free materials in the course catalog and allows students to search for such courses when choosing their classes.
A federal bill proposed in both houses of Congress in March, The Affordable College Textbook Act, would direct the U.S. Department of Education to create grants for OER initiatives at the state and institutional levels. The proposal would seek to build upon the existing federal Open Textbook Pilot program, under which $47 million has been appropriated and which has saved students an estimated $250 million since its creation in 2018.
“OER initiatives at various levels have demonstrated the transformative potential of OER in addressing the challenges of affordability, accessibility, and quality in higher education,” the research paper concludes.
