Recooperating Costs

On Sunday, the Undergraduate Council (UC) passed legislation calling for a much-needed reduction in the cost of coursepacks. We commend the UC leadership for taking this first step in fulfilling one of its major campaign promises and urge the College to follow through on the bill’s provisions.

Ranging from $10 to over $400, coursepacks can be exorbitantly expensive for students. Thus far in 2006, sourcebooks and coursepacks have costs students over $700,000, most of which is spent on Core courses. The financial burden raises questions of educational inequity, as some students are driven away from otherwise engaging classes solely because of affordability. The College cannot simply stand by as the equality of academic opportunity at Harvard is threatened by the rising costs of these readings.

The remedies are simple and obvious—embarrassingly so for a college that has shamelessly shirked away from finding ways to reduce the financial burden of coursepacks. First, for most courses, a bulk of the readings are accessible through the Harvard Library E-Resources, a service for which students already pay copyright permissions in their tuition. Students threw away $40,560, for instance, on the 30 readings in the Ec10 coursepack this semester; all those readings are available for free on E-Resources. In fiscal year 2005 alone, over $4 million was spent by students to pay for the 6,820 e-books and e-journals available through the database; the College cannot continue to double-charge students for such materials and expect us to remain in silence as we shoulder such an unnecessary and avoidable burden.

As the bill suggests, and as this page has articulated in the past, teaching fellows and professors should be trained and encouraged to expand their use of E-Resources. And for those instructors who continue to neglect such readily available training, Harvard should use its resources—perhaps even hiring undergraduates on work-study—to do it for them; the net savings accrued to students would not be insignificant.

Moreover, for well over a year, this page has called on the College to harness the power of competition to make articles that are unavailable on E-Resources cheaper to include in coursepacks. Specifically, we hope that a centralized office dealing with coursepack cost-cutting—such as the UC’s proposed Centralized Resource Efficiency Optimization—will shop reading lists around to different printers and find the best deal possible for students, including the flexibility of reading coursepacks online, eliminating printing costs altogether.

We certainly do not want to compromise the content of a course in the name of thrift, but to the extent that we can do something, it is irresponsible to neglect the practical burden that high prices impose on students. The College, and professors, ought to heed the UC’s call and work to reduce the costs of coursepacks. These simple measures will have a profound impact on the equality of educational opportunity here, and the College must not hesitate to implement these recommendations with all deliberate speed.