COST

“I think everyone agrees with me when I say that texts are ridiculously expensive especially for the rare times they are used. Even when I do use a book in class, it has never been everyday. I get that they are sometimes very useful, but when you do not have much money to begin with, it's extremely frustrating to spend $500 on books that will barely be used.”  --Anonymous First-Year Student

“...my Spanish book was $300 and has almost no resale value.” --Anonymous First-Year Student

A few weeks into my last semester in a Literature M.A. program, I had the small misfortune of having my car broken into, my textbooks stolen.  My laptop was stolen too, but thanks to the fact that I use cloud storage with some consistency and only lost my most recent days of work, the initial trauma of the need to do work over again after the laptop theivery was overshadowed by the loss of the textbooks.  The textbooks that were stolen for one class were worth over $70, and now I had to purchase them again!

Having to purchase these texts twice put the cost of this class in course materials at the same price I paid for the replacement laptop.  I bemoaned the fact that I would have to repurchase material I had once had, needed these texts as quickly as possible, and that only 2 of the 3 texts I need to repurchase had e-books available.

These annoyances were allayed by the facts that I actually wanted to  possess the information in the lost textbooks: Jones and Hafner’s Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction, Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues, and The Digital Divide: Arguments for and against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking. These texts are relevant to my work and my research beyond the classroom and I have kind colleagues in my large shared office that are studying in the same courses and willing to share (thanks Allison, Will, and Mav!)--all in all, I would expect I had a better relationship to these textbooks than many other students.  

Following a survey, performed by the three contributors to this blog, of a sample of 80 of the 1,275 member class of 2018 regarding their practices with course materials and other kinds of texts (like digital streaming services), the idea that my relationship to textbooks was better than many students might seems like an understatement.

This survey, the methods of which are extensively described here, produced some particularly interesting results when viewed through the lens of costs.  First, the results of the some of the survey questions in the pure--then, I will offer some analysis through the framework of cost.  

When asked about their practices of reviewing course texts beyond the semester and returning course texts at the end of the semester, students reported low likelihood of returning to their course texts for information (or other use) and high likelihood of returning them to the store (or elsewhere) for some cash.  Figures 1 and 2 summarize the student responses to these questions.

Figure 1: Students’ predicted likelihood of returning to course texts beyond the semester and predicted practices of textbook return

Figure 2: Students' predictions regarding the number of texts they will reuse following the semester

Finding it likely that you will review or reuse your course texts in any way appears to be a fairly rare--less than 20% of students reported that they anticipate it as likely that they will do so. In fact, the number of students that anticipate getting rid of all texts without consideration of whether or not they will get money for them is higher (26.3% of respondents) than the number of students who anticipate using their books again (16.3%)!  

Our finding that just over a quarter of students surveyed anticipate getting rid of all of their texts at the end of the semester without concern for recuperating cost bears discussion.  It is especially significant because these students are in their second semester and have some ideas about and reflections on their practices in and after their first college semester.

 This desire to rid themselves of texts may be an expression of a lack of financial need on the part of this fourth of the student population, but it’s likely that something more complex is going on here.  We may be seeing a disengagement with traditional course methods on the terms of students’ “digital nativism” to work with Marc Prensky’s language in his piece, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.”

This disengagement from course texts is something that will be explored more in our post on “Engagement”--but it is worth considering that it is happening on the terms of cost and beyond the terms of cost.  Prensky makes a wide argument about watershed changes in students attitudes that goes beyond the terms of cost, but we might gain something by bringing digital practices of payment into consideration.  Prensky argues of digital natives, a category that his 2001 piece places students into and we might place our students in now: “Students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a ‘singularity’ – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called ‘singularity’ is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.”

We might read students practices with their course materials as a “really big discontinuity” from the standpoint of the print native or the digital immigrant.  This becomes especially significant when viewed through the lens of cost.  After reviewing the cost of materials for all of the sections of the second-semester composition course at our university, a class that is required of all freshman and combines literary study with writing instruction, we might begin to quantify exactly how significant this discontinuity is.  Even though this course runs for a relatively low average cost, we are seeing an overwhelming student attitude toward texts that demonstrates disengagement from the value of texts.

The rationale and methodology of this study and its full results are available.  But one of its most significant findings is that, assuming full enrollment in each of the 47 sections (a fair assumption, because in accounting for 22 students a class that total comes in at 1,034, which is less than the total freshman class size) the total cost of books for these courses is HUGE.  We are talking higher than a year’s tuition huge.  The total course of course materials, when calculated at the list price of purchase (as described in the linked methodology) is a whopping $59,062.74!  This is significant when we consider students are not returning to these texts after the semester and one of the main course objectives of this course is to get students to engage with literary texts.

This number seems like small change, when compared to the total cost of the two required texts for the first semester composition class, Everything’s an Argument and Quick Access Brief. The costs of those texts when multiplied by the number of incoming freshman puts the total cost of course texts for the Fall semester at $130,050.  And that is the price when considering the list price of the abridged edition of Everything’s an Argument!

With such high costs, the average individual text in these composition and literature classes weighs in at $20.14 and the average total materials cost is $57.14. Sure, composition and literature classes are likely cheaper overall than science classes or other courses with truly expensive textbooks. But seeing that most students find it unlikely or somewhat unlikely that they will return to books, we might think students are looking to recuperate monetary value from their texts after the semester more than they are looking to find educational value in them beyond the semester. From there, we might wonder what students’ sense of the value in these texts during the semester.

From the student reflection quoted at the beginning at this blog that puts forth their sense that usage is “rare” and certainly not “everyday,” we might wonder how this is possible that students are rarely using their texts and if there are ways to help students value course materials.

Here, as instructors, we might hear a call to reconsider our material practices in the first year writing classroom.  We would like to use what we have learned from the syllabus study to make a few suggestions.  

1. Engage in conversations about students’ practices with course texts and instructor expectations. Recent research, performed by Sung Wook Ji, Sherri Michaels, and David Waterman in their study “Print vs. Electronic Readings: Cost Efficiency and Perceived Learning” found significant cost advantages in electronic readings, as well as a student preference for electronic readings. At the same time, these researchers did find that students (about ⅔ of them) did choose to incur costs by printing electronic readings.  What is clear is that students practices with course materials are complex--complex enough to make us wonder about their status as digital natives--as teachers, we should figure out how to account for their practices.
2. Include clear course policies about reading practices in syllabi. In our syllabus study, we identified very few sections of the course that engaged a conversation about editions and formats of course texts.  While many syllabi list course texts by ISBN, very few discussed whether these editions were required or if other editions were allowable.  Only one single section directly and explicitly had a policy on e-books.
3. Consider allowing students to use editions of texts in the public domain. Many sections of the courses studied are using texts old enough to be in the public domain.  No sections’ syllabi contain a reference to the fact that their texts are or may be available online for free.  It seems that this is a significant missed opportunity for fostering potential engagement with literature beyond the semester, for “online for free” is a material practice that pulls digital natives in.

These suggestions work to respond to and intervene what we have learned from students’ reported practices and bring them to accord with the practices we encourage as instructors.