Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Al Franken, D-Minn. and Angus King, I-Maine, recently introduced a new bill to Congress intended to make college textbooks free and accessible online to students, professors, researchers and others.
According to congress.com, through the Affordable College Textbook Act, a competitive grant program would be created and awarded to universities that creates and adopts free online textbooks to achieve savings for college students.
It also ensures that any open textbooks or educational materials created using program funds will be easily accessible to the public, and requires entities who receive funds to complete a report on the effectiveness of the program in cutting costs for students, according to congress.com.
According to UNM data, an instate UNM students pays on average $1,064 annually on books and supplies, accounting for 5 percent of all student expenditures over the year.
The bill encourages colleges to have their faculty create online textbooks and make them available online for anyone to use freely, as well as expand the use of open educational resources.
With the possible advent of free online college textbooks, UNM would actually not lose money from a decrease in profits at the University bookstore, said Melanie Sparks, interim executive project director at UNM Institutional Support Services.
"The bookstore is part of an auxiliary, we are a business unit,” Sparks said. “We get no funds, we don't get student fees, we don’t receive any tuition. We have to run the bookstore like its own business…it all has to be self-funded. We pay rent, overhead and custodial to the University, but our goal is to break even."
The bill, if passed, will give a grant to the University, but the faculty creating the academic content will not directly receive compensation.
The bill defines an entity that can receive funds as "an institution of higher education or group of institutions of higher education." Thus, departments and faculty can't be directly awarded grants.
However, there’s nothing in the bill that prevents an eligible entity such as UNM from using grant funds to compensate departments, faculty and others for related work, according to Stephen Burd, associate professor of management information systems for Anderson School of Management.
Congress.org states that cooperation between faculty is essential for the grant to be awarded. Staff at UNM have varying opinions on the level of cooperation that is required for the legislation to be effective.
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"I would most likely participate in the creation of open resources such as online textbooks, with of course, appropriate compensation," public speaking instructor Margaret Siebert said. “With some of my classes, I would prefer not to have to make the students purchase the book, especially if they rarely read it during the semester, and then return it for trade after the course is done. For other classes that I teach the texts are not just textbooks, and they are usually more valuable after the semester is over."
Department Chair of Anderson School of Management Leslie Oakes said she supports the legislation, for the good of those it is most intended to serve.
“Students often pay for textbooks twice; they pay a salary to the author and then pay for the book later. A significant portion of the rise in higher education costs occurs because funds generated from state and federal governments and student tuition are diverted into corporations and end up distributed to shareholders,” Oakes said. “Instead, open access textbooks and journals make knowledge available to all students, not just those formally enrolled."
Burd said that the bill has flaws that need to be addressed. Money could be spent in more efficient methods to achieve the same end goal, he said, such as textbook publishers using the grant money instead of institutional faculty.
“Or, perhaps the existing law on pricing transparency for educational materials could be strengthened to better enable competition in the marketplace?” Burd said. “Or, perhaps improved pricing transparency could be coupled with money to build, operate and maintain the equivalent of an Amazon.com for faculty textbook selection — a system combining price, quality, content, and other information for all educational resources.”
This month marks the second time the Affordable College Textbook Act has been brought up by Durbin in Congress since 2013, when it was first considered. In a press release on his website, Durbin cited the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as doing something similar to cut textbook costs for students.
“The Affordable College Textbook Act can replicate and build on the successes we’ve already seen in Illinois,” Durbin said in the release. “I hope college faculty throughout the country will explore the opportunities that exist today to use open source materials in their courses to save students money, and I hope my colleagues in Congress will support this legislation to provide federal support to that effort.”
Denicia Aragon is a staff reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
