Yeah, I know that’s a big claim. And I don’t use the word “revolutionize” lightly. But considering that the model relies in part on some of UC-Davis’s 30,000 undergraduates’ subsidizing the courseware costs of their fellow students and in part on the university’s inserting itself more directly into the book-buying business and throwing its clout around to press publishers into drastically lowering their prices to make the model possible, I think it’s an apt description, at least for the textbook market.
UC-Davis is no stranger to textbook experiments. In 2014 it pioneered the “inclusive access” model by getting several major publishers to offer digital versions of their textbooks to all students at deeply discounted prices. That model has now spread to hundreds of campuses, with publishers promoting their own versions.
But inclusive access is more of a course-by-course solution. “Equitable access” would extend the concept campuswide, so that all students would pay a book fee to the university — the current goal is to make it about $199 a term — and know that they were getting all the course materials assigned for their classes because the university was cutting deals with publishers to make it happen.
If that sounds a little like the way health insurance works, it’s no accident. Jason Lorgan, the UC-Davis official who is the architect of the idea, says both markets suffer from the same “principal-agent problem.” That’s when the person assigning a book (or prescribing a medicine) isn’t the one paying for it. Lorgan also says both markets could benefit by having an intermediary (like an insurer or the campus store) step in to negotiate for better prices.
The health-care model isn’t just an analogy. UC-Davis has hired the same actuarial firm that now helps set its student-health-service fee to advise it on whether $199 a term, with three terms a year, will prevent the university from losing its shirt. Meanwhile, Lorgan says, the university is asking publishers for “an unbelievably dramatic reduction in price.”
For some students the fee would be more than the actual costs; for others it would be far less. “In the book world, the healthy patients are like the English majors,” Lorgan says. That might seem unfair, but he notes that the university also charges the same tuition for all classes, even though it costs more to offer some than others.
The “equitable access” business approach carries other risks too. If professors require books that are not covered by whatever deals UC-Davis cuts with publishers, that could add expenses to the program. Or as Lorgan puts it, “That’s sort of like our flu epidemic.”
Crucial to the project’s success is getting price breaks from publishers. UC-Davis has begun talks with the 10 biggest ones, which account for 90 percent of its undergraduate book adoptions. “At first they laughed at us,” Lorgan told me.
But the realities of the book market play into the university’s favor. Today, even in courses whose professors haven’t switched from textbooks to open educational resources, many students don’t buy new books from publishers; they buy secondhand, they rent, or they use pirated books from other sources. “That’s the biggest leverage that we have,” says Lorgan.
So he and his colleagues showed each publisher an estimate of how much revenue they’d make if every enrolled student was buying the materials, even at a discounted price. “As soon as we did that, they stopped laughing,” Lorgan says. Eight out of 10, he says, would make more under the new model. He’s given them until mid-August to come back with pricing proposals. The university hopes to begin the project in the fall of 2020.
Making market clout count.
In 2008 I wrote about how the University of Phoenix used centralized book buying to cut costs, and ever since then I’ve wondered why more colleges weren’t using their market clout in the textbook arena for the benefit of students. Lorgan agrees, although he notes that even five years ago, market conditions might not have made this as feasible as he sees it today. He says he’s been inspired by the stand the University of California took this year, when it ended its subscription with the journal publisher Elsevier over prices. And unlike the Phoenix model, UC-Davis doesn’t limit what professors can assign. “Ours allows 100-percent academic freedom,” says Lorgan.
The model has some other pros and cons. All students would be assured of having all their course materials on Day 1 in the same digital platform, with the ability to opt out. But the economics of the model depend heavily on the university’s getting most of the materials in digital formats, not print, which might be a drag for some students who supposedly still prefer hard copies.
Ultimately, though, it’s the promise of “equity” in the model that I find most compelling.
Lorgan believes many students now are “doing without” in many of their courses because they can’t afford their books. And he’s still haunted by the story of one of his UC-Davis bookstore colleagues, who came to the university intending to major in aerospace engineering, but switched before the first day of class, when he discovered he couldn’t afford even one book.
“That should never happen,” says Lorgan. Students “shouldn’t have to stay in certain fields because of their income.”
Higher education: Still the solution for a work force in flux?
That’s the topic of a panel I’ll be moderating this week at the Forum on the Future of Work, a conference organized by Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies and Upcea, an association for professional, continuing, and online education. What do you think?
Readers of this newsletter know I’ve been writing on that subject a lot this past year, and I’ll continue to do so. In part that’s because the action on this beat keeps on coming. Just this month, in fact, both Walmart and Jet Blue said they were each adding new colleges and degree programs to their tuition-benefit programs, and the education arm of Amazon Web Services announced that its collaboration with George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College had helped make possible a new pathway to a bachelor’s in applied science in cloud computing.
While to me it’s a no-brainer that the basic answer to the question above is yes, obviously there’s a lot to parse about how that actually takes shape. I’m forming my questions now — on topics like the role of credentials, the business models needed for lifelong curricula, and potential new modes of instruction — but I also recognize the value of a little creative crowdsourcing.
So help a girl out, would you? What else would you ask a panel that includes a dean of continuing studies, a professor of education specializing in learning technologies, and an associate vice provost for digital education and innovation? What barriers do you see on the horizon? What concerns need to be top of mind? Even if I don’t use your exact question or comment on Friday, it will inform my future reporting.
Got a tip you’d like to share, or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com.