The average American undergraduate spends $1,240 per year on textbooks and other course materials. Students at public two-year universities spend more on average than students at private four-year universities, meaning that those with the least resources to begin with are hit the hardest by the expense. In 2020, 25 percent of students polled said they worked extra hours and 11 percent said they skipped meals to afford textbooks.
There was a time not long ago when students could ease the burden of textbook costs by buying them used or, more recently, finding free PDF versions online. When a single textbook can cost hundreds of dollars, finding creative ways to cut down on textbook costs has been a financial necessity for students living in a country where total student loan debt is $1.75 trillion and counting.
With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating our move toward increasingly online education, hardcover texts are becoming relics of the past. You might expect that trend to actually help solve the problem, but instead it’s having the opposite effect. As education becomes increasingly digitized, classrooms aren’t just being moved to Zoom or Blackboard — rather, entire curricula are being outsourced to private…
