Albany Tech looking to reduce cost of student textbooks
College trying several initiatives to lower costs to students
File Photo
File Photo
File Photo
File Photo
From Staff Reports
ALBANY — Albany Technical College has moved forward with attempts to reduce the cost of textbooks for students through several initiatives. ATC President Anthony Parker and senior staff started discussing options this summer on how to reduce the cost of books and, in turn, pass that cost savings on to students.
Plans are now in place for the fall semester of 2018 to start this savings, with further reductions in all programs planned by the end of the school year.
In an effort to lower the costs for students across the board in a variety of programs offered at the college, Albany Tech will begin offering the option of loose-leaf versions of books when available; ebooks; OER (Open Education Resource), and some programs will begin using an online service called Cengage Unlimited, which will give the students their course plus other options at their fingertips.
Multiterm subscriptions will also be available for the programs that are using ATC Cengage Unlimited.
College officials have been aware of the expense of books for many years. For the past 12 years, ATC has lowered the cost by offering a 20 percent markup not to exceed $20. This has been done in efforts to minimize the price passed on to the students.
According to CBS News, the average cost of college textbooks has risen four times faster than the rate of inflation over the past 10 years. That has caused 65 percent of students to skip buying required texts at some point in their college career because of a lack of affordability. Notably, a movement is growing to provide copyright-free open-access textbooks.
However, these programs have been adopted at only 6 percent of the nation’s schools. Albany Technical College is located in the Second Congressional District of Georgia, the eighth-poorest district in the United States. Despite serving one of the poorest congressional districts in the nation, ATC ranks in the 90th percentile in producing unduplicated graduates and in the 100th percentile of producing diploma graduates among TCSG colleges.
Parker said ATC is attempting to be the engine for change in the lives of its students, and making books affordable is one of the many methods being used to develop an employable work force.
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