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The soaring cost of college textbooks has been well documented. The negative effects of these rising costs have also been well established: from decreased access to higher education to increased time-to-graduation rates. As an alternative to traditional course materials, open education resources (OERs) are shown to be equivalent in academic quality, student satisfaction, and student learning outcomes. Despite OERs’ potential to offset the negative effects of rising textbook costs, no research to date has focused on OERs among historically underserved student populations.

For each of these reasons, CSU Channel Islands’ openCI initiative recently completed a campus-wide study of over 700 undergraduate students. Statistical analysis revealed textbook prices to be a significant educational barrier for all CSUCI students, with a disproportionately negative effect among racial/ethnic minorities, low-income students, and first-generation college students. These results suggest a potential lack of academic capital among CSUCI’s historically underserved students, while also challenging each of us in higher education to remove unnecessary financial barriers to our student body’s academic success.

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