The future is here: The University of Maryland University College of Upper Marlboro, Maryland has announced that starting this semester, physical copies of textbooks will be officially obsolete. UMUC is the first college in the United States to make the switch to exclusively online course materials–which are all free of charge. The school says this will save the student body literally millions of dollars.
Tuition, room and board and other miscellaneous fees to attend school are already astronomical without the added expense of textbooks, which sometimes end up being hardly utilized (if at all) during class, and can only be sold back for a fraction of what students initially paid for them. Textbooks can often run students several hundred dollars per semester. UMUC dean Aric Krause told CBS that the university has conducted research and found that students learn just as well from online materials as they do from hard copies.
It’s heartening to see a school taking steps to be considerate of the financial strain higher education puts on students. UMUC students seem thrilled with the school’s decision, and it seems like this can only be a positive thing–and, hopefully, a growing trend. Saving money, paper and time we’d otherwise spend trying to hunt down the best deals? We can only hope other universities start to follow suit ASAP!