‘Free’ College Textbooks: Not Really Free

Think free textbooks are too good to be true? You’re probably right.

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I don’t remember purchasing the behemoth, probably because we never used it. While earning my Master’s degree, I had a coarse with the head of our small program, and he required us to buy a $100.00 hardback testament to density.

Five of us met with him once a week, all young teachers who were working on temporary certificates in rural Texas. Read: surviving on a salary that hovered right over the $20,000 mark. That $100.00 hit was one I felt, a gut punch right where my stomach recognized another several $2.00 Tuesday meals awaited. Calories? Yes. Nutrition? Well…

And then… we never had any assigned readings. Week in, week out, nothing. The book sat untouched, for the whole semester, somewhere in the clutter of my tiny apartment bedroom.

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The question facing all of us is how we will confront a future where jobs for everyone may no longer be a realistic possibility.

One unwelcome shock of college was to peruse the campus bookstore shelves, and find your professor had sent you to the pricey aisle. You hoped to discover that bright orange “Resell” tag, which meant the bookstore would knock a few percentages off the price. At both my undergraduate and graduate alma maters, textbooks were a major hidden cost of college. The GOA (Government Accountability Office) estimates that students pay, on average, an extra $1200 a year in book fees.

That’s a lot of cash, folks. Especially for many first-generation college goers.

So when I read about Senator Al Franken’s recent proposed legislation to offer textbooks online – for free – I thought: yes. Here is a way to use technology’s wonder to mass benefit. Save students some money? I’m all for it.

But political policies often have unintended consequences, and there may be a major problem lurking behind the seeming win-win of free textbooks.

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In a recent article at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson outlines the tenuous future of work. It’s a long piece, but the gist is this: it is a feasible prediction that a combination of growing populations and increasingly able machines will eradicate jobs at unprecedented speed. The question facing all of us is how we will confront a future where jobs for everyone may no longer be a realistic possibility.

The problem is already in full swing in Higher Ed, seen in the unconscionable treatment of adjunct professors. Adjuncts are the temporary employees of universities, fellow holders of doctorate degrees, but those not offered tenure-track positions. Many adjuncts are paid pennies on the dollar for their work, teaching classes at a fraction of the price a fully-hired professor would cost.

Such an imbalance in treatment comes down to an imbalance in supply and demand. Every year, there are far more students graduating with PhDs than there are positions to employ them. One friend who was hired last year in a coveted tenure-track job said that for the six hundred graduating applicants in her field, there were approximately forty jobs available.

Those are seriously stacked odds, my friends.

The Internet is putting us out of business.

We are tempted to say that these eternal students should get out in the world and get themselves a “real” job. But consider that 25% of college graduates are already unemployed or underemployed. Turns out, “real” jobs are often as elusive as those tenure-track openings, because “real” jobs are disappearing. Whether overseas or to technological advancements, there are simply too many seekers, not enough positions.

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How does this relate to textbooks?

Very tangentially, but here is how I see it. There has been a rush to embrace the internet as some messianic miracle. In his book The Internet Is Not the Answer, author Andrew Keen observes that giving savior-like qualities to technology has done us more harm than good. One statistic he cites is that in its heyday, Kodak employed nearly 150,000 people. Today’s gadget wunderkind, Facebook. employs 450.

The Internet is putting us out of business.

This is, of course, not true for everyone. I’m writing for an online forum, something that by definition would be impossible without the Internet.

But I’d encourage anyone interested to read Keen’s book, because the world’s human future will – barring some major unseen shift – look markedly different than what we’ve been taught to expect. Maybe we will share jobs, or maybe we will make up work for ourselves. Maybe we should all brush up on wilderness survival skills, as we head towards something akin to The Last Alaskans.

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I kid on that last point, but let me tie this back to free college textbooks. Making everything available online for free – whether in the form of MOOCS or textbooks – inevitably puts people out of work. If 100,000 students can learn physics at their laptop screen from a Harvard professor, then you will lose the jobs of thousands of physics professors. (You’ll also lose the invaluable – and success-predicting – human, relational interaction of the professor-student relationship).

Either way, “free” textbooks aren’t exactly free.

Book publishers already operate on tiny profit margins. Textbooks cost mega bucks because mega bucks are spent putting them together. Check out the list of contributors at the front of any textbook, and you’ll see just how many learned people put time and effort into creating them.

If textbooks are suddenly free to college students, one of two things will happen. Either the government will kick in funding for textbook publishers to keep up their work (i.e.: everyone pays for this with taxes), or the quality and relevance of textbooks will decline as publishers scramble to provide something on a fraction of the budget they had before. Jobs will be lost.

Either way, “free” textbooks aren’t exactly free. Which is a real dilemma, since charging struggling students high fees on top of already-expensive tuition payments seems unfair, to say the least.