Many professors assemble course readers full of scholarly articles and add them to the required materials for their classes. Unfortunately, these supplements can run almost the cost of a textbook ““ reaching prices of $80 and, in some cases, even more. Even worse for the average student’s budget are the courses that require both a pricey textbook and a hefty course reader.
These growing costs can prevent students from buying these materials, which are necessary for their classes, thereby reducing the accessibility of a complete education for the average starving college student. The university system, which has pegged educational accessibility as a platform issue, needs to address this major flaw.
The course reader’s cost comes mostly from copyright issues, but professors can buy the rights to reproduce an article en masse for educational (or any other) purposes, and save money for the school and the students.
Even better, many scholarly articles are already available to students through online article databases the school subscribes to, such as JSTOR.
Through a university computer or proxy connection, students can access millions of articles logged in these databases and then read them on their computers.
To help cut some of the cost of these readers, some professors have started linking to articles of interest in JSTOR or other databases from class home pages.
It would be nice if this grew into a larger trend: Instead of professors opting to cut these articles out of the bulky course readers, they could point students to the online versions.
The Copyright Clearance Center now offers universities a special deal to purchase rights to reproduce articles and excerpts. As long as the university is granted permission by the publishing company and the Clearance Center, the university pays a one-time use fee for the article rights, thereby cutting down on the cost of printing articles that may be used by multiple classes or teachers.
Some textbook companies allow professors to select chapters or excerpts from a larger text and have it published specifically for the course syllabus, leaving out extraneous content.
Not by coincidence, paying for a shorter version of a textbook is cheaper, sometimes significantly.
If more teachers took this approach, or even if they communicated more and chose a customized departmental text, fewer editions and new books would be required. Students taking a track of classes who could use the same book for each class in the series might actually get to use the $70-plus book for longer than a quarter.
Often it is said that education has its price and we are taught to value what we learn.
While we can accept the growing cost of a higher education, it is not as easy to understand why we are being bombarded with expensive course materials, especially when about half the material is already available to us.
There may be a high price to pay for a good education, but more importantly we need to make education affordable and accessible to all. One great place to start is with course materials.
If costs can be cut little by little for each reader and textbook, more students will be able to afford the proper materials. Then we can start talking about how accessible a higher education can be.
Unsigned editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily Bruin Editorial Board.