Rapper Kanye West went to the social media website Twitter in February to share his views on the cost of textbooks. “Education puts Americans into debt before they even get a chance to get started,” he wrote. “We have to lower the price of textbooks.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, gathers information on labor and the economy in the U.S. BLS information shows that from January 1977 to June 2015, the cost of university textbooks increased by 1,024 percent. This increase is at three times the rate of normal inflation. Within a few hours of West writing his comments on Twitter, Tidewater Community College in Hampton Roads, Virginia responded. “We got you,” the school wrote on its Twitter account. “The nation’s first textbook-free degree.” Tidewater began offering what it calls a “Z-degree” in 2013. Z-degree stands for “zero-textbooks.”