Letter to the editor by: Max Jensen
Textbook companies have tactics to lock college students into the highest possible price for their products. Because of these companies and our disinvestment in higher education, the cost of a course can significantly outpace the value of the information it offers, and so more Oregonians are discouraged from achieving a degree.
Colleges tell you that your textbook is good for the whole year, so if you need to buy a $330 Spanish textbook you’re actually getting three $110 textbooks. If like me, you’re returning to college after having already taken two terms of Spanish, then you are paying for three Spanish textbooks when you only needed one. These books are loose-leaf so you have to get a binder to hold all the sheets and you need a code for online content which is a verbatim copy of the textbook. This means you can’t get a used textbook, you can’t share one with a friend, check it out at the library, or resell it after you’ve taken the class. You are locked into paying the maximum possible price for materials that are comparable and sometimes worse than materials you can get from a free language app on your phone.
We could instead be using OERs, or Open Educational Resources: free, often peer-reviewed textbooks teachers can download and personalize for their courses. If Oregon colleges worked to develop standards and best practices for OERs then we could work toward an educational system that isn’t held hostage by for-profit companies.
BRAVO!!!