Given I am a big proponent of open data, replicable scientific results, and open access publishing, I struck up a friendship with Scott Jacques at Georgia State University. One of the projects we pursued was a pretty simple, but could potentially save students a ton of money. If you have checked out your universities online library system recently, you may have noticed they have digital books (mostly from academic presses) that you can just read. No limits like the local library, they are just available to all students.

So the idea Scott had was identify books students are paying for, and then see if the library can negotiate with the publisher to have it for all students. This shifts the cost from the student to the university, but the licensing fees for the books are not that large (think less than $1000). This can save money especially if it is a class with many students, so say a $30 book with 100 students, that is $3000 students are ponying up in toto.

To do this we would need course enrollments and the books they are having students buy. Of course, this is data that does exist, but I knew going in that it was just not going to happen that someone just nicely gave us a spreadsheet of data. So I set about to scrape the data, you can see that work on Github if you care too.

The github repo in the data folder has fall 2024 and spring 2025 Excel spreadsheets if you want to see the data. I also have a filterable dashboard on my crime de-coder site.

You can filter for specific colleges, look up individual books, etc. (This is a preliminary dashboard that has a few kinks, if you get too sick of the filtering acting wonky I would suggest just downloading the Excel spreadsheets.)

One of the aspects though of doing this analysis, the types of academic publishers me and Scott set out to identify are pretty small fish. The largest happen to be Academic textbook publishers (like Pearson and McGraw Hill). The biggest, coming in at over $300,000 students spend on in a year is a Pearson text on Algebra.

You may wonder why so many students are buying an algebra book. It is assigned across the Pre-calculus courses. GSU is a predominantly low income serving institution, with the majority of students on Pell grants. Those students at least will get their textbooks reimbursed via the Pell grants (at least before the grant money runs out).

Being a former professor, these course bundles in my area (criminal justice) were comically poor quality. I accede the math ones could be higher quality, I have not purchased this one specifically, but this offers two solutions. One, Universities should directly contract with Pearson to buy licensing for the materials at a discount. The bookstore prices are often slightly higher than just buying from other sources (Pearson or Amazon) directly. (Students on Pell Grants need to buy from the bookstore though to be reimbursed.)

A second option is simply to pay someone to create open access materials to swap out. Universities often have an option for taking a sabbatical to write a text book. I am pretty sure GSU could throw 30k at an adjunct and they would write just as high (if not higher) quality material. For basic material like that, the current LLM tools could help speed the process by quite a bit.

For these types of textbooks, professors use them because they are convenient, so if a lower cost option were available that met the same needs, I am pretty sure you could convince the math department to have those materials as the standard. If we go to page two of the dashboard though, we see some new types of books pop up:

You may wonder, what is Conley Smith Publishing? It happens to be an idiosyncratic self publishing platform. Look, I have a self published book as well, but having 800 business students a semester buy your self published $100 using excel book, that is just a racket. And it is a racket that when I give that example to friends almost everyone has experienced in their college career.

There is no solution to the latter professors ripping off their students. It is not illegal as far as I’m aware. I am just guessing at the margins, that business prof is maybe making $30k bonus a semester forcing their students to buy their textbook. Unlike the academic textbook scenario, this individual will not swap out with materials, even if the alternative materials are higher quality.

To solve the issue will take senior administration in universities caring that professors are gouging their (mostly low income) students and put a stop to it.

This is not a unique problem to GSU, this is a problem at all universities. Universities could aim to make low/no-cost, and use that as advertisement. This should be particularly effective advertisement for low income serving universities.

If you are interested in a similar analysis for your own university, feel free to get in touch with either myself or Scott. We would like to expand our cost saving projects beyond GSU.