Prof Vents about Textbook Rentals
Does renting textbooks save students money or cost them the real value of a college education? Sheila Liming, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, makes a case for the latter in an opinion column for Inside Higher Education. “A degree used to mean learning from texts and racking up a cumulative store of skills and reference materials along the way,” she wrote. “But with the rise of textbook rentals, the rules of learning are getting rewritten, and not by education professionals, and not in accordance with the needs of student consumers, either.” Her issue with rentals is they’re promoted as a cost-savings option but there are limits to how students can access and use the materials. Those are roadblocks that inhibit critical thinking and conversation, according to Liming. “Rental companies insist that a given book can only be ‘useful’ to a student for the duration of a single semester, and so encourage students to see their own learning ...