For many students, the spring semester is a time to work out the kinks from the fall and begin anew. Unfortunately, this was also true for the Linfield Bookstore.
The First Day Complete program builds in the cost of textbooks into students’ tuition and ensures they are ready for students to pick up on the first day of classes. The tuition increase is a fixed rate, and not tied to how much your textbooks would have been without the program.
This semester, the disbursement of textbooks that professors had ordered was delayed considerably, some by a month. This has caused some problems for students and professors in the educational process.
“Our required textbook took a really long time to get,” senior Annie Flood, a marketing and journalism and media studies double major, said. “Around a month, I think, so we weren’t able to use it for a while.”
Professors also had similar issues with their students receiving textbooks.
“It’s First Day Complete, and in the years they’ve done this, it was like fourth week complete or something like that,” Kevin Curry, a journalism and media studies professor, said.
These issues caused problems with ensuring that course schedules could be kept on track.
“Students in my media and law class didn’t have books for the first four or five weeks,” Curry said. “For a couple of the assignments early on, I just photocopied the chapter and put the PDF on Blackboard so they could read it. But, what that means is that I had to take the time to take a 40 page chapter to scan it in the machine.”
The issues with getting textbooks were not isolated to Flood and Curry. According to Curry, many other professors had similar issues with getting books this semester in their own classes.
“It’s universally wide,” Curry said. “It’s something we’ve talked about in faculty meetings as well, so I think it impacted everybody that had a textbook.”
Everyone agreed that this spring was the worst it’s been.
Linfield’s Vice President for Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer, Mike Wenz, said that what happened this semester was an anomaly.
“The spring semester was substantially different from what we saw in the past,” Wenz said.
The way that the First Day Complete Program works is that a few months before the beginning of a semester, professors place orders for the textbooks that they need for their classes. The deadline for the spring was in mid-October.
Barnes and Noble, the partner that runs the program, then takes those orders, acquires the books, and sends them to the bookstore. Wenz noted that normally the system runs really smoothly, but that this semester there were two reasons for the delays.
“The first one is that the local response from the bookstore was not as they expected it to be,” Wenz said. “Certainly not their standard of response. I think that their internal control process, as we move forward, will help us put the bookstore on better footing.”
The response from the bookstore Wenz is talking about occurs when books are ordered late, either because of the late addition of a class, a new adjunct professor being hired, or a myriad of other reasons.
The other response comes down to the number of textbooks to order.
“Part of the issue is that they were ordering to an expectation of how many students are going to enroll in a class with some level of cushion,” Wenz said. “But in some cases, their expectation was lower than what actually turned out. What they’ve done is essentially agree to order textbooks to course caps rather than expected enrollment.”
What this means is that, formerly, Barnes and Noble would order books based on enrollment trends. If the class had a cap of 20, and normally has 15 students, they would order 15 textbooks, along with a few more as a cushion. Now, Barnes and Noble will order 20 textbooks, even if they think that the class won’t fill up.
“In previous semesters when there was a shortfall and they were able to adjust to meet the demand, and this semester those adjustments didn’t happen,” Wenz said. “It was a combination of enrollment patterns not matching adjustments and a slow reaction to where other problems were addressed.”
However, these changes are made to only address the problems that were seen in the spring, problems that Curry said have been going on for some time.
“This year seemed particularly bad, but every year there’s at least some delay in getting the books to the students,” Curry said.
Flood said that she had also experienced issues in the past getting her books on time.
“It often takes a while to get textbooks,” Flood said. “And oftentimes books will not be ready when they say they will. Before textbooks were ‘covered,’ most students bought their textbooks online, for a cheaper price, and we would be able to get them on time for classes to start.”
Some students feel as if the built-in textbook cost in tuition is more than they would’ve paid to get their textbooks independently. When the First Day Complete Program was first proposed, cost was a major concern.
“I think that students certainly spend more on textbooks than they did before that on the order of probably a hundred or so dollars per semester per student,” Wenz said. “However, this also means that they’re getting their textbooks on time, and part of the reason why students were spending less money was that they simply weren’t buying books.”
This change to textbooks being included in tuition, rather than a separate cost, has caused professors to change the way they teach classes.
“When it was first introduced,” Curry said. “I wasn’t in support of it because, for me, I was developing courses that would not need textbooks, so it wouldn’t charge students for textbooks. So, Media and the Law, for example, two years ago, when I taught it, I didn’t have a textbook. I used online readings I could get about the court cases, and I made my students read the court cases themselves, so I designed a course that didn’t need a textbook. Coming around to this semester, I added a textbook, but I added it in part because I knew my students would already be paying for that textbook whether I assigned it or not, and I wanted them to be able to get something for the money that’s in their tuition going to books.”
The added cost of textbooks in students’ tuition is universal. No matter if a student is taking classes with textbooks or without, they will still have an added cost.
Wenz is confident that the problems experienced this spring will not be a recurring theme with the First Day Complete program.
“I expect they’ll be back on track,” Wenz said.
Others, like Curry, feel students may be better off without the program.
The changes in the process may help ensure books arrive on time for all students, especially since books are being ordered for class caps rather than expected enrollment.
While some questions remain about whether these changes fix the underlying cause of the issue, they will all surely be answered when students return in the fall.
