Stop punishing students

At Washington State University, in-state students pay $10,996 annually on tuition. If that wasn’t enough, students are forced to pay an additional average of $1,200 a year on textbooks.

What’s the point of paying a college tuition if it doesn’t cover the full cost of your education? Why should students have to pay an additional fee to do their homework, when they are already paying thousands of dollars a year?

It doesn’t have to be this way. And, for what it’s worth, it hasn’t always been this way. Since 1980, textbook costs have increased 812%.

Additionally, where students could once work around these astronomical costs they no longer can. Resources that could once be found online for free have been locked behind access codes only given once a premium is paid. Without these access codes, students aren’t just locked out from a textbook; they are locked out of required texts, homework and exams.

There is a solution to this problem: Open Educational Resources. OERs include textbooks, practice problems, tests and other materials that are available for free with a copyright license.

By advocating for the usage of OERs, we can chip away at the cost of higher education.

(Washington State University tuition costs for the 2020-2021 academic year, other statistics from the Open Textbook Alliance.)

Thalia Felice

Liberty Lake