Does renting textbooks save students money or cost them the
real value of a college education? Sheila Liming, an assistant professor of
English at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, makes a case for the
latter in an opinion column for Inside Higher Education.
“A degree used to mean learning from texts and racking up
a cumulative store of skills and reference materials along the way,” she wrote.
“But with the rise of textbook rentals, the rules of learning are getting
rewritten, and not by education professionals, and not in accordance with the
needs of student consumers, either.”
Her issue with rentals is they’re promoted as a cost-savings
option but there are limits to how students can access and use the materials. Those
are roadblocks that inhibit critical thinking and conversation, according to
Liming.
“Rental companies insist that a given book can only be ‘useful’
to a student for the duration of a single semester, and so encourage students
to see their own learning as fated for expiration and uselessness,” she said. “Even
worse, rental companies and vendors—including campus bookstores—actively discourage
students’ efforts to use the text they have rented, since wear and tear
threatens the longevity of a book that a vendor wants to re-rent over and over
again.”
To Liming, rental is just the latest “scheme” to make a
buck, and is doing so at the expense of students’ education, depriving them of the ability to look back at previous classes or assignments to gauge their
progress.
“Students are paying more and being coerced into renting
because they are told they must, and because
they have not been made aware of their options,” she concluded. “It is
therefore up to education professionals to show them—and to fight for the
expansion of—worthy, cost-friendly alternatives, including both OER (open
educational resources) and affordable print editions. Those alternatives do
exist, and anyone who says differently is, as the saying goes, probably selling
something.”
Liming
may have a point when it comes to affordable alternatives for her English classes,
but what about required texts for introductory biology or chemistry classes? Do
students with other majors actually want to keep them to reflect back on and
will they ever consider those textbooks affordable?
