Opinion: Free Books for Every Intro Class
[1] On the first night of my college algebra class last fall, the teacher held up a thick textbook and told us we would need it by the next class. It cost $185. I clean offices thirty hours a week, and that money was already set aside for rent. So for the first month, I did my homework from photos of a classmate's pages. I was not the only one getting by that way. Our college should replace the costly textbooks in its intro courses with free online books that students can read on a phone or a laptop.
[2] The price of books keeps many students from having them at all. Last spring, this paper surveyed 400 students on our campus. Four in ten said they had gone without at least one required book because of its price, and one in eight said they had dropped a class for the same reason. A student without the book falls behind in the first weeks of a class, which is when catching up is hardest.
[3] Free books can do the job just as well as the ones students pay for. The free books I have looked at were written by college teachers, and they cover the same topics as the books in our campus store. A community college in the next county moved its intro biology and English classes to free online books three years ago. According to that college's own yearly report, the share of students who passed those classes rose from 68 percent to 73 percent, and fewer students dropped out partway through the term.
[4] The change would also cost our college very little. When I asked my English teacher about it, I learned that finding a free online book for the course had taken one afternoon and had cost nothing at all. The teacher even liked the new book better than the old one. If finding a book takes one afternoon, the cost to the college is close to nothing.
[5] Some people say that students learn better from a printed book they can hold and write in. That may be true for some students. But a free online book can be printed too. Our library charges five cents a page, so even a 300-page book would cost $15 to print, far less than $185. And a book that a student can open on a phone during a lunch break is better than a book the student never buys.
[6] The college has a choice to make. Either it makes every intro textbook free, or it shows that it cares more about selling books than about helping students learn. I hope the people who run this college choose students. If you agree, please sign the letter to the college president at the student center before the end of the month.
