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Introduction
Attaining a college degree in the United States is expensive. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average annual cost of college for undergraduates at a four-year public university is around $26,000.1 Between 2011 and 2021, college tuition and fees alone increased by almost 33 percent.2 To meet these costs, 38 percent of undergraduates take out student loans, and the average amount borrowed is $45,300.3 This debt is a long-term burden for student loan borrowers; four years after graduation, borrowers still owe an average of 78 percent of their original loan balance.
In this context, even smaller expenses can accumulate and cause financial stress for college students. One of these smaller expenses is textbooks. Like tuition and fees, textbook costs have risen at a rate far outstripping the consumer price index in recent years.4 Research has shown that the high cost of textbooks is affecting the educational experience, with as many as two-thirds of students choosing to forego purchasing required course materials.5 One increasingly popular solution to the challenge of high textbook costs has been open educational resources, or OER. OER textbooks are similar to commercial textbooks in many ways; both types of textbooks are written by faculty experts in the field and are typically reviewed by other experts. OER textbooks are unique, however, because they are licensed by their authors so they can be reused, redistributed, and even revised by others at no cost. This means that faculty can use OER textbooks in their courses at no cost to themselves or to students.
Students and faculty struggling to manage the burden of textbook costs commonly turn to their campus libraries, which often have textbook reserves programs to provide students with short-term access to textbooks. Though useful, textbook reserves programs have limitations; for example, students must share textbook access with classmates, fines can be steep for financially disadvantaged students, and students can only keep the textbooks for a short period of time (typically a few hours). Further, libraries are facing the same textbook price increases as students; libraries cannot afford to provide access to every textbook needed. To help manage these challenges, librarians have become leaders in the effort to switch to OER textbooks.
This qualitative study...