Zero Textbook Cost: In California, a Community College President Leverages Short-Term Funds for Long-Term Impact

By Susanna Cooper

This blog is the third in a series on the Wheelhouse Research Collaboration Council. The first blog post introduces the Research Collaboration Council and the second post discusses various pandemic recovery initiatives.

Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds helped rescue community college budgets during the pandemic. But the downside of the funds was that they lasted only a few years and then disappeared.

“About a year in, I was growing concerned about where money was being expended,” Cosumnes River College (CRC) President Edward Bush recalled about Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) spending decisions. “What are we going to have to show for this funding two, three, five years down the road?”

CRC, which enrolls about 15,000 students annually and is part of the Los Rios Community College District in the Sacramento region, had used federal recovery dollars to support students’ basic needs, such as food, cash, and fee waivers. But Bush was looking for a way to use some of these one-time federal dollars to spark ongoing change that would help students enroll and persist to earn certificates or degrees or transfer. He landed on an initiative to bring high textbook costs for students down to zero.

The concept of lowering or removing textbook cost barriers was not new in California, which in 2018 required all California Community Colleges (CCCs) and California State Universities (CSUs) to flag for students which courses could be taken without any requirement to purchase textbooks. It was a direction that Bush had been contemplating well before the pandemic. The shift to open educational resources (OER), also referred to as zero textbook cost (ZTC), was a significant undertaking requiring buy-in from faculty, many of whom had previously been reluctant to change practice. In 2021, Bush set an ambitious goal for CRC to become a ZTC college within a year.

“It was more than a lift,” he recalled. “We were behind our peers statewide.”

My Wheelhouse colleagues and I are paying close attention to innovations like these as part of a broader research project that aims to identify effective institutional-level strategies to ensure educational continuity during and following the pandemic. In collaboration with the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, we are exploring the relationship between college-level recovery activities and a variety of measures of student success. This research, one of the projects in the ARCC Network, will inform practitioner and policymaker understanding of whether, where, and for whom recovery investments have made a difference.

Gaining Faculty Support

CRC had a number of California and national peers it could look to as examples in the ZTC effort, including American River College, San Jose City College, Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, and the City University of New York, among others.

Using $1.5 million in HEERF dollars as a one-time catalyst for change, Bush offered $5,000 to each full-time faculty member who signed on to convert all their courses to ZTC. Adjuncts were included, with their incentives prorated. He released one of CRC’s librarians to work full-time on the effort.

“She said, ‘What, by 2030?’ I said, ‘No, next year.’”

The timing for this effort was ideal. “The classroom as we knew it was being disrupted,” Bush said. “It felt like there was an opening to do something innovative within the classroom space.”

While the amount of the stipend offered did not need to be negotiated with faculty, Bush consulted faculty leadership.

“When it was just an idea, I called the faculty senate president. ‘Tell me if I’m crazy. I don’t want to go any further if this won’t fly. But let’s not let this opportunity go to waste so we don’t have anything to show for it.’”

Senate leadership was supportive and encouraged faculty to participate. Bush, who has led CRC for nine years, identified bottlenecks and made personal appeals. Indeed, with significant resources offered to support them, faculty signed on. In the span of that year, CRC went from having fewer than 100 course sections to having 900 sections with ZTC. At the Los Rios District level, a web page now directs students to ZTC courses available across the district’s four colleges. By actively encouraging students to prioritize ZTC course enrollments, the college enlisted students to support the initiative.

Tracking the Benefits of ZTC

At CRC, the goal of full conversion within a year was not met, but Bush estimates the college will achieve it sometime in 2024. CRC is tracking enrollment and success rates in ZTC classes; Bush reports that early data show higher enrollment and slightly higher success rates than in non-ZTC classes.

Research on OER offers reason to believe that the benefits of CRC’s effort could extend beyond affordability to accessibility of materials and course performance. For example, increased access to course learning materials can increase students’ engagement with the assigned readings. OER has also been found to improve course grades and lower course withdrawal rates, particularly for Pell Grant recipients, part-time students, and those historically underserved by higher education. Given these findings, the ZTC initiative at CRC looks like a good bet, with strong potential to ease barriers for students seeking degrees, certificates, and transfer.

For CRC, the opportunity to use federal resources to drive a transformational initiative without dipping into a stretched general fund has been a godsend. The college is now seeking a state ZTC grant, which the California Legislature and governor funded in 2021, to offer smaller, more surgical incentives for faculty who have not yet signed on, with a particular focus on courses students need to complete their degrees.

Susanna Cooper is the executive director of Wheelhouse: The Center for Community College Leadership and Research at the University of California, Davis.

The research reported here is part of a broader effort to document California Community Colleges’ recovery activities to inform community college leaders and state policymakers on best practices post-pandemic. This multi-year Wheelhouse and California Education Lab project, titled Evidence to Inform Improvement: Supporting California Community Colleges in Pandemic Recovery, is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (Grant R305X220016) in a grant to the University of California, Davis, and is part of the ARCC Network. Other partners include the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO), the Community College Research Center (CCRC), and the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute of Education Sciences or the U.S. Department of Education.