Colleges Invest Big Bucks in Open Materials

In an effort to lower the cost of course materials for their students, colleges and universities are ramping up initiatives to create their own open educational resources (OER), sometimes with funding and assistance from outside organizations.

The biggest project to date, the OER Degree Initiative launched by Achieving the Dream (ATD), a network of 38 community colleges in 13 states, received a lot of attention when it was announced in June. Many of ATD’s schools had individually dabbled in creating open materials on a small scale. By collaborating, though, ATD was able to secure $9.8 million from a group of major foundations to support development of free digital courseware for entire degree programs.

In Canada, the provincial government of Saskatchewan has set aside $250,000 to help produce nine open textbooks and coursepacks for students at the University of Regina, University of Saskatchewan, and Saskatchewan Polytechnic. One of the books in development—on the topic of engineering economics—is intended to supplant a traditionally published book that retailed new for $202.

It will take a year before that book is ready for class use. Saskatchewan and ATD, like others pursuing OER endeavors, are obviously counting on their initial investments to pay off over a long time, with little expenditure needed to keep the resources up to date.

California State University Monterey Bay and Monterey Peninsula College took a slightly different route for their joint degree program in sustainable hospitality management. The two schools partnered with the Monterey County Hospitality Association to gain support from the private sector. Local companies involved in tourism have contributed funds toward course and OER development. Students enrolled in the program obtain their free materials digitally through the campus library.

Auxiliary Heads: Store Service Outweighs Profit

When it comes to the campus store at colleges and universities, serving the needs of students and faculty is more important than generating revenue in the eyes of auxiliary directors.

In a recent survey, 85% of auxiliary professionals with oversight of the campus store said the store’s main purpose was as a service provider for students and faculty. While making money from the store was still a high priority for 68% of respondents, service was far and away a more critical function.

The survey, conducted by OnCampus Research, part of the indiCo services at NACS, also showed that 88% of auxiliary administrators thought the campus store should ensure students have access to all the course materials they need right on the first day of class. Some 72% also gave a high priority to low prices on course materials.

Auxiliary directors don’t view sales of course materials as a source of revenue. According to the survey summary, “most administrators do not expect to generate revenues through course materials sales, with just about half of respondents indicating revenue as a priority, and the majority of those respondents ranking it only as moderately important.”

Being able to ensure a high level of service to the school community was the main reason 55% of auxiliary directors said they chose to continue institutional operation of their campus store.

Blog Studies Book Costs by Major

Most of the rants about the expense of college textbooks that appear at the beginning of every term focus on total costs. Priceonomics, a conservative think tank, took a look at individual majors and found the average class costs for some are four times the amount of the least expensive ones.

The site used data from the fall 2015 textbook list from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. It also assumed students purchased new versions of every required and optional textbook listed for the more than 750 courses on the list.

Economics students would pay $317 for books per class, topping the list. Language majors were second to economics at $268 per class, but sciences/social sciences filled the next nine slots. African-American studies books cost just $80 per class.

The most expensive book was a biochemistry text at $406 each. While physics textbooks cost an average of $158 per book, engineering books were $124 per title. English and literature books were the least expensive, with an average of $19 per text. The best books at buyback were music titles, which retained 68% of their value.

“In order to avoid these costs, many students may choose to buy used books, rent books, or pray the library has a book when they need it,” wrote Dan Kopf, author of the Priceonomics blog post. “There are also advocates pushing professors to choose open textbooks (textbooks for which there is no copyright). Though it may limit your long-term earning potential, our analysis suggests another way to lower your textbook cost is to choose a major in the humanities.”

Get Numbers Straight on Textbook Markup

Affording a college education—including course materials—is a hot topic right now and may become a prominent issue in the upcoming presidential race. Sharing accurate information will be critical to the discussion, however, there is misleading data being bandied about on the Internet.

For example, this post on Wise Bread, a blog community about personal budgeting, calls out college textbooks as one of nine consumer products with supposedly huge markups. The post claims that in the 2014-15 academic year students faced “markups hovering around 200% for brand-new textbooks.”

That doesn’t square with the financial data collected from campus bookstores by NACS’ OnCampus Research. For years, according to survey results, the margin on new textbooks has averaged around 22%. Used texts are about 34% and custom materials are 26%.

“Markup” and “margin” aren’t the same, of course. Markup is what the store adds to the wholesale price to come up with the retail price (what the shopper will pay). Margin is the percentage of the retail price that represents the markup.

Here’s the math for nonretailers: A student buys a textbook from the store for $74.98. Based on NACS’ 22% average, the margin is $16.50, which means the store got the book at wholesale for $58.48 and the markup is 28.2%. That’s a far cry from the 200% alleged by the blog post. If the book is rented to the student, which many campus stores do these days, the markup is typically even lower.

It’s also important for those debating the cost of course materials to understand that neither margin nor markup is synonymous with profit. Out of that margin/markup amount comes staff salaries and benefits, mortgage or rent, insurance, utilities, cleaning and repairs, checkout systems, lighting and shelving fixtures, materials (shopping bags, signage, etc.), shipping fees on almost every product sold in the store, and other normal business expenses.