Three weeks into the semester, my invoices keep stacking up: $15 on iClicker, $200 on materials and $115 for an “online textbook.” Sorry — scratch that — not even a textbook, just the privilege of doing online homework worth 35% of my grade.

If these embedded costs were never negotiable, why not just make them a part of the tuition?

It turns out I am not the only one concerned with the steep price tag of public education. In the 2026 MASSPIRG survey, 75% of students reported their classes required an access code to do the mandatory coursework.

Some argue that professors choose these supplemental learning materials, so the universities have no control over the pricing. However, that does not lessen the financial burden students face at the expense of their learning — especially for students coming from low-income backgrounds.

“I’m the first in my family to make it to college. I get hit with hundreds of dollars in textbook costs that are not optional […] so I do what thousands of students do, I put it on a credit card,” Jacob Nevins, a business administration and public policy major at UMass Amherst, said in a MASSPIRG press release. “Textbooks should never be the reason a student cannot learn.”

Physical textbooks and e-books are created through institutional publishing and human labor. I’m not suggesting that getting a degree should be entirely costless. Learning is, reasonably so, a time investment as much as a financial one.

It wasn’t until taking on a job as a private English as a Second Language tutor that I began to realize how profoundly an individual’s economic background can shape their access to knowledge. My students are two primary schoolers who go to Kumon daily while juggling pickleball, soccer and a week full of enrichment activities financially supported by their parents.

In person, I “teach” at my apartment’s dining table as my landlady occasionally strikes up “Chinglish” conversations intertwined with the hearty smell of steamed pork ribs she made for my roommate and me.

Strangely, in my own minuscule way, I began to mirror the same role held by the mega-publishers I so often critique. A position to give access to knowledge.

But a question is left unanswered: Who deserves knowledge?

Is it the two kids whose potential is fully funded? Or the mother who works day and night, learning when she can through bilingual podcasts and dinner-table conversations?

I cannot decide which pursuit is more deserving, and perhaps that is the point. No one should hold the authority to determine who deserves to pursue knowledge, nor should anyone be condemned for the simple desire to know more.

However, the increasingly unaffordable textbook prices keeps the American public education system from fulfilling the promise of equitable learning.

Since the 1990s, textbook prices have skyrocketed by 800%, according to College Board, surpassing healthcare services and even house prices. If the fundamental needs of students and faculty in order to academically succeed should be fulfilled by universities, why can’t providing more open source materials to the professors be one of the many ways of support?

State-funded, public academic institutions have long served students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Yet, academia has begun to resemble a gated community — one where you must swipe a card to access something you cannot even own, despite paying $115 for it. If building luxury apartments in a low-income neighborhood is called gentrification, what should we call the outsourcing of our lessons and grading systems to for-profit companies?

Go ahead — gentrify everything, including my education.