Balance the (text)books

With the rising costs of higher education, we look at our thinning wallets and start to question: is college really about opportunity?  While Gov. Heineman is entertaining the idea of a tuition rate freeze, there is a cost that won’t be eased for Jill Freshman and Joe Sophomore: textbooks.

The blame does not rest entirely on the bookstore; they’re contractually bound and subject to the whims of corporate ownership.  It might seem like a racket that you spend $70 dollars on a used textbook, but at the end of the semester you receive barely enough back to buy lunch. But business is business; they’re still the only retailer for the blue exam book.

With hectic semester transitions, some faculty members will forget to submit their book lists to the campus bookstore, and students are relieved to seek online outlets.

For other professors, a delicate balance hinges on the pocket books of their students.  How do you choose between using the cheaper and plentiful previous editions and enhancing our education with the more costly, newest version?

Some might write off the textbook question as a way to test students’ commitment and how much they are willing to put toward learning and their future.

The symptom this creates is that students will wait a few weeks to see if the course inclusion and assigned reading warrants purchasing the “required” text, or if they can squeeze by on the information in the lecture alone.  It’s a gamble, but what other alternatives do we really have?

Chadron State College, along with eight other colleges nationally, has taken the lead with the Kaleidoscope Project, an institution that uses Open Education Resources (OER).  While the OER platform shines as a beacon of cost-effective hope, the digital divide, as well as outages that plague campus infrastructure from WiFi-connections to learning management systems to email service providers, quickly dampen the allure of open-source learning.

For books that are not only essential to your major, but also your future career, nothing compares to having the physical copy for your library.  As long as there’s that sentiment amongst scholars and professors, books will be printed and the students will pay.