In a February letter to the editor, Sherry Li ‘25 criticizes the over-reliance of many STEM classes on digital textbook sites with paid, single-use access codes. She cites Open Textbook Alliance data revealing that prohibitive costs have led 65% of students to forgo buying textbooks. This is understandable given that each book costs between $80 and $150 on average, meaning that the typical college student may spend anywhere from $600 to $1400 each year on books and other supplies.
Textbook prices are only increasing as new editions come out. Because course materials are often required, their manufacturers need not pay attention to demand when setting prices, making for extremely high profit margins. This incentive also leads them to frequently publish revised editions even when the content is only marginally different, simply so they can extract as much profit as possible from a single title.
These alarming statistics and practices represent a major equity and accessibility issue. Yet every semester, professors continue to require expensive textbooks, putting unnecessary financial pressure on students who already have to pay the high price of tuition. Although Smith does offer textbook assistance by application, these funds are only redeemable as credit at the campus bookstore, which might not have the title they need. It would certainly be preferable to restructure the system in order to reduce or entirely eliminate the need for textbook aid.
Traditional textbooks are not only expensive, but tend to be impractical. They often come in massive hardcover editions that are awkward to transport, taking up valuable space on already cramped dorm room shelves. I’ve known students to skip readings or problem sets altogether simply because getting out their heavy textbook and paging through it was too inconvenient. The burden of lugging textbooks around, coupled with their high prices, also drives many students to online piracy. However, with the caveat that they’re legally obtained, online textbooks do have distinct benefits; they allow students to easily search through hundreds of pages and instantly skip to the assigned section or find a specific term and its definition. And they can be accessed from virtually any mobile device, which most students already carry with them everywhere they go.
Furthermore, textbooks are often packed with a disjointed medley of content from a multitude of experts. Their function is to contain as much information as possible on a given subject. This frequently means that much of the text is irrelevant to students’ and instructors’ direct interests. Consequently, students may end up purchasing an entire 600-page book for a class, only to read a couple chapters assigned throughout the semester and then watch it collect dust. This is an absurd and wasteful system.
Students can sometimes find cost-effective alternatives to purchasing brand-new textbooks, such as free PDFs online or used copies sold at a reduced price. However, some courses preclude these options by requiring students to pay full price for digital versions purchased through specific sites like Perusall, which allows students to add annotations visible to the entire class. Not only are texts accessed via these sites expensive, but access to them expires after a short period of time, usually only six months — that is, unless the purchaser is willing to fork over an additional wad of cash for unrestricted access. Sites like Perusall can and should still be used in conjunction with free educational resources instead.
While they can be useful tools in some subjects, instructors do not need to rely solely on textbooks to educate students. Instead, they should transition to assigning only free online resources and existing titles that are owned by the school and available for lending. Many courses already do this, such as SDS 192 and 100, which use online textbooks hosted on free and high-quality websites. Resources such as these receive government funding and are comparable to traditional textbooks in terms of content and quality. They can also be updated far more easily than print editions as our knowledge of science continually grows.
In the event that a suitable textbook is truly unavailable online, Smith should provide class copies for students to use. Most of us are adults and know how to treat materials with care and respect, and these textbooks could likely be reused for years or even decades depending on when the next edition comes out. In many cases, even if a new edition were to become available, the instructor could delay the need to repurchase by simply giving the extra information it includes and refraining from assigning outdated sections of material.
Smith considers its progressiveness a key institutional value. In line with this principle, we must dare to imagine a world in which no one has to pay extra for required educational materials, a world without clunky textbooks and online access codes that expire in a few short months (but still cost just as much as hardcovers). It’s time we stop playing into the hands of predatory corporations and abandon outdated notions of what a textbook has to be.
