Real Student Resources, Real Savings
With already high and rising costs, college textbooks have become a financial burden for most students, with many students reporting that sometimes they forego buying them all together to save money or even skip meals to afford books. According to Follett, an education technology company, textbook prices have gone up more than 800 percent since 1978. In a 2018 study by Cengage, a global education and technology company, 43 percent of current and former students said they have skipped meals to afford books and 31 percent said they take fewer classes to cut down on textbook costs. At Butler, OER charges vary by course, but are substantially less than textbooks.
For Butler students enrolled in English Composition I and II classes, the OER textbooks are homegrown. With the new Butler-authored English OER textbooks, offered for the first time during the 2018-19 academic year, each student in the Comp I and II classes saw their textbook tab for each class drop from $240 to just $40. Given the number of students who have taken Comp I and Comp II since the change, there have been over half a million dollars in savings.
While that is significant, it is just the beggining.
