Happy Wednesday, Politicados, and happy birthday to me. Today marks the day I am officially out of the primary Nielsen marketing demographic and enter the era where no one cares about me.

How will I celebrate? By describing a niche political issue about which I have OPINIONS and didn’t talk about last week because instead I thought it’d be funny to talk about Taylor Swift.

The Department of Education is currently consider a rule to limit the use of inclusive access in higher education. What is inclusive access? Inclusive access is a new way of paying for textbooks in which textbook costs are added into a student’s tuition bill. Typically this occurs at a flat rate per credit hour.

Those of you who have been in higher education, or know some who have, have probably encountered the outrageous cost of textbooks. Textbook costs have ballooned outrageously, and it’s not unheard of for students to pay hundreds, and sometimes even over a thousand, dollars for required course material.

On its face, inclusive access seems like a good deal. A normalized, flat rate for student textbooks might level the playing field — all students pay the same price, whether their textbooks would cost $100 or $500 buying individually. However, inclusive access limits options for students. Whereas before they could look for used copies from Amazon or other third-party vendors, inclusive access will lock them into the bookstore’s ecosystem. It also only provides textbooks as a rental, meaning students will have to turn their books in — even if they’d like to keep them to have on hand for further study. These programs tend to automatically opt students in by default, meaning if they want to forego the flat charge and look for books on their own, they have to a) know the option exists; and b) know where to find that option to opt-out, which is often buried and made as difficult as unsubscribing for a service.

It also keeps higher education at the whims of the bookstores, which are typically profit-seeking entities. While prices might seem reasonable now (often around $20 per credit hour, or $300 for a 15-credit hour couse load semester, though it varies from institution to institution), once you’re locked in, you’re beholden to the prices that the bookstore set. And institutional inertia means it can be hard to break free of that. What is $20 per credit hour this semester will almost certainly quickly balloon — $25, then $30, then $50.

Publishers have co-opted the language of inclusivity and accessibility to make it sound like a great deal (they put inclusive right there in the name!), but it’s smoke and mirrors. All of this supports a publishing model that charges students exorbitant amounts of money to profit publishers, while the academics who do the labor see virtually none of the money, and provide a gateway for bookstores to rake in more profit while still cutting the academics and school out of the equation (college bookstores traditionally don’t make money on textbook sales, but instead through branded school merchandise).

So I support this potential move by the Department of Education! There are better models for textbook affordability to pursue — states can encourage and incentivize their institutions to adopt open educational resources for example. These are openly licensed material that can be be shared, revised, and remixed with classes for no cost, or very low cost. We can break the strangehold the publishers and bookstores have over higher education, and work to lower the cost of college to make it more accessible and affordable.

Thanks for listening to my rant. Be kind and thoughtful today. Cheers.