STUDENT P I RGS | 1 5 open textbooks Two-thirds of students have skipped buying books because of the high out-of-pocket cost beyond the set price of tuition. But students who don’t buy books repeatedly say they find themselves at a disadvantage in the classroom. For years, the Student PIRGs and our allies have been working to raise visibility for the huge savings that open textbooks promise students. Our research over the years has shown that students routinely skip buying textbooks, and that openly-licensed, freely available educational resources can (and have) saved students millions. In fact, our new report investigating those high textbook prices for common courses at schools across the country entitled Open 101: an Action Plan for Affordable Textbooks, found that switching course materials in these core courses from access codes and traditional textbooks to OER would save students $1.5 billion dollars a year if adopted nationwide. To that end, we joined Sen. Durbin to introduce the Affordable College Textbook Act and continued our advocacy on the local level. In places ranging from West Virginia and Georgia to Oregon, we worked with librarians, administrators, and faculty to create institutional grant programs that support instructors as they transition to OER. These local programs routinely save students more than a million dollars in their first few years.
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