There is a body of worrying research that indicates textbook costs for college students now run upwards of 75-80% of tuition. We in higher education are now approaching a grim milestone in which students will effectively have to pay for their classes twice—once for the class itself and once for the materials required within the class.

I must admit I have always found the textbook industry within the American educational system to be nothing short of a racket. My bitterness stems from my undergraduate days when I showed up to campus on day one knowing I was going to be an English major. Those next four years of my academic career were marked by thousand-page anthologies and collections which contained more material than could possibly be read in a hundred semesters even though my class lasted only the one. My dismay, of course, only intensified when I realized the textbook I purchased for the fall semester’s Modern Era Literature did me no good for the spring’s Postmodern Era Literature. In those rare occasions when I thought I might be able to recycle a past textbook, an inevitable new edition had been released, rendering my copy obsolete. I was struck by the tragically short shelf-lives these texts had despite their premium price tags.

Several years back, I made the commitment to offer all of my classes using open educational and fair use resources. I wanted to make sure students who attended my courses would not need to spend any money on required texts. As a professor of English and creative writing, perhaps this switch was far easier for me than for professors in other disciplines. This is a point I will acknowledge and concede. When having these discussions, however, I prefer to frame the conversation in terms of access. I am of the belief that at Mesa Community College, that word, community, matters. We are in the business of serving the people in our community. This philosophical pillar is one that, at least in part, informs our policies—specifically the open-door enrollment policy. We want those in our community to have access to a quality education. This is, in my own opinion, not a controversial statement to make. Just as we think of open enrollment as an access issue, so must we do the same regarding textbook costs. At what point do those financial burdens for a student in the Mesa community become cost-prohibitive? I suppose what I’m asking is this. What good does it do to have an open, inclusive enrollment policy if we end up pricing those students out of the very classes they previously enrolled in?

I know the teachers at MCC are working hard to ensure, as best they are able, that costs for course materials are mitigated or, at the least, managed. I know this because I have sat in meetings with colleagues across multiple disciplines in which we have discussed these very issues. The questions asked during those meetings are valid ones. How do we balance a textbook’s quality with its price? Which is the better option: the excellent resource which runs $160 or the mediocre one that saves the student fifty bucks? I want to argue that the correct answer is none of the above. The beauty and power of higher education is that we as individuals do not need to know everything. We can rely on our colleagues to provide assistance in the places we need. Open educational resources, once limited to a few passion projects of a handful of dedicated teachers, are now extensively available in robust and fully curated databases like OER Commons and MERLOT amongst many others. I cannot help but feel the time and energy we as individual instructors and collective departments put into finding that Goldilocks, just-right textbook is time and energy that would be far better spent investigating a free-for-students OER resource.

I am excited by the conversations we are now having at the cultural level about free community college education. If we in the field are going to make good on promises around not only accessibility but equity, then we will need to engage in these conversations further. In the meantime, however, I do not think we can afford to await the outcomes of those conversations while our students are forced to pay exorbitant prices for course materials within a course they have already paid for. We need to ensure access to Mesa Community College is more than just an open door.