Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.
It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market.
The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a product(education via tuition) and choices are made for you(textbook selection) that you have to pay for in order to pass the class(see the realization of tuition). That's fundamentally broken market mechanics.
The folks in charge of making the market decision(which textbook to use) should be the same ones paying for it. We have a term for this pattern - moral hazard, and we shouldn't be surprised when students continue the same pattern of behavior when the system continues unchanged.
Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly. I still have them all. One of them was a Discrete Mathematics book that cost $250. We used it twice to do a "reading assignment" and since the class was only taught by the teacher who wanted this book just this one semester, the school store wouldn't buy it back at the end of the semester. It still creaks when I open it.
I was a first generation college student, my tuition and living expenses were funded mostly by a scholarship (covered all of my tuition and about 30% of living expenses) and a private student loan covered the remainder. My cash flow was strictly negative and the surprised $1100 bill right at the start was extraordinarily unappreciated and the fact it went to such comically little use was just spitting in your face.
So the subsequent 7 semesters I paid $0 for books, which still left me with an average cost of books at $137/semester. Ridiculous.
> Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly.
This really bothers me.
Universities hold themselves up as virtuous. Then students hire them to provide to provide an education. Instead of being agents for the students, the students are instead treated like a captive market. There is a very real conflict of interest in universities profiting off textbooks they "require" while being hired to provide a class. I really don't get how any of this is acceptable.
Then you get required to take an ethics class as part of your degree.
You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?
Please be aware that higher education is a massive dumping ground for the lowest-performing segment of the politically-connected managerial class, who are too cowardly and lazy to run for elected office, and too stupid and impulsive to make it in industry.
Academia is perfect, for them: a gigantic stage for demonstrating moral superiority and hiring friends, with no fundamentals that matter at all.
Totally agree. I only had one professor who had any idea how things work in the industry, and she went back to it within a couple years. I'm not saying there's no value at a university, but most of it is a waste of time and money.
Administrators, to stop us academics from doing our jobs too productively.
>That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
We don't have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes because making those things is not possible, and you can't make impossible things possible by throwing money at them.
And of course this becomes worse if you're using other people's money. If you're throwing your own money at an impossible task, you'll run out (or your investors will run out). If you're collecting the money as taxes and then throwing it at the impossible task, you can waste as much of it as you want. If you're telling people "do this impossible task or I shoot you", you end up doing a lot of shooting and not much teleporting.
That doesn't seem like a remotely good reason to pay loads of money to administrators in Antigravity Logistical Inclusion Tracking while the PhD students in quantum gravity can't afford rent.
Have just checked financials of one of the providers. It appears that at least 50% of it goes to Sales General and Administrative expenses. Those don’t include educator salaries, buildings, or material. Those are all “admin” expenses.
Oh and another 14% gets invested - buildings and securities.
Tearing down buildings which millions of dollars were spent on, to put up new buildings which they spend millions of dollars on.
Often the old buildings were not that old at all! They just no longer project the kind of prestige the university thinks is needed to persuade students to enroll.
I don't buy that. Middlemen typically exist to solve some existing market inefficiency, or they exist through corruption and regulatory capture. The latter is a huge problem, but it's not THE problem. Ballooning administration seems to REALLY be the problem all over the place. But... Why is that?
Because there is no competition, and demand has massively outstripped supply. If you want to make money in academic management, you need to build an organization to manage and then justify a high salary to do so. And this is what happens. Huge staffs doing nothing but justifying the boss’ salary have appeared at universities over the past few decades.
books and libraries and radio and tv and internet will revolutionize education - people said.
It was either a joke or schools and universities have an incredibly tight grip on their market.
Picture what illusive product one can make in those settings. You can have insane prices, the only limit would be what people can afford. The maximum price then becomes maximum debt. While at the same time you can rush out a product that is complete crap, borderline believable but only for the ones who make the relevant decisions.
I see a docu one time about a semi-commercial chinese education formula. Each subject is cut up into tiny modules, seemingly as tiny as possible. One tiny booklet and 1-2 classes. You remember dependency hell? That was it, on steroids.
The cert for the module, combined with others did give you access to additional modules and the bundle of coupons eventually turned into a more milestone like diploma but this wasn't the interesting part! You could take a different path after doing a module and become an instructor assistant, become an instructor and then become an instructor assistant instructor! If someone discovered a hard question there was always additional gray matter above you in the food chain.
They had people who could barely bang 2 rocks together TEACHING how to bang the rocks as if the universe revolved around it.
Others build a parkour tightly packed with modules one after the other. If they failed anything they got stuck eventually as you cant do C without A+B
The early adopters of the MLM program had their hands full assisting the teachers teachers teachers. It looked humbling to say the least.
edit: I forgot the part where one could start a business and continue to enjoy the advice from those you paid to teach you and the job offers listing specifically what modules were required.
You basically answered it: it's going to non-teaching administrative staff, facilities/construction, and other random expenses.
Some of the administrative bloat is for regulatory compliance, but most of it seems to be driven by the expansionist tendencies of bureaucratic organizations.
Oddly enough there actually seems to be less administrative/secretarial support for faculty, while student mental health remains a problem that doesn't seem to be addressed adequately.
> Then you get required to take an ethics class as part of your degree
My state university ethics professor published their own book, and required an extra-credit assignment be turned in from a tear out at the end of the book.
Sounds like a lesson you will never forget - and you even share it with other people. In a sense, that is a good lesson and a job well done by the professor.
That's just marketing. For a lot of degrees it's effectively a version of child care for people out of high school. That some people manage to learn something meanwhile almost seems accidental.
I kind of think that 2/3 of university students would be better served to instead do an apprenticeship in the trades. eg: Plumber, electrician, and similar
I'm not sure lecturers profit off textbooks. What you are witnessing is more likely indifference and hubris from the academics than a deliberate strategy to extract more money out of students. This doesn't make it less unethical, but unless it's a textbook they themselves authored, it's probably not a conflict of interest.
It’s in the interest of all professors collectively (including those who hope to be real professors someday) to prop up the problematic idea that a book ought to cost $400+ just because it’s a textbook, because professors write textbooks, no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.
> no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.
There is an difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up. Some professors are simply indifferent to their students' plights. As far as these professors are concerned their students are just an inconvenient bleep in their oh-so-important life. Extracting money from them is not on their radar.
The vast majority of professors don't write textbooks. In fact there are probably a lot more profs who do care, and assign open books, or no books at all, than professors who make a living writing textbooks.
> difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up.
Sure, but the only interested parties here presently are:
- students
- publishers
- professors (a few of which "author" or "customize" textbooks and stand to profit)
Students have zero power, publishers have every incentive to increase prices, and most professors don't get involved because like you said, it's not really relevant to them personally.
I agree that if a significant contingent of professors and lecturers essentially started boycotting the "textbook" industry, by using and contributing to "open source" books, or at least authoring or collaborating to author content that they give to their students at no cost, that would amount to applying pressure to the exploitatative business model.
I studied a semester abroad (Erasmus) in Portugal and I was so surprised that the expectation there was to get the course book photocopied. The university had a copy room where you pay for a literal copied version of the book that someone made with a xerox machine.
In the 90s in the US, for more hard science and math courses, the course was taught against course notes that you needed to buy from one of the many print shops next to the university. This was spiral bound, often a couple hundred pages and costing 20-40$ because that is how much a short run print job costed. These were made by the instructors.
For courses where a book was required, you could check a book out from the reserve and photocopy the whole thing on one of the many high speed photocopiers on campus that all shared a linked card system, so you didn't have to use coins.
I graduated from a US university in 2018 and my favorite math course was taught by a professor who told us at the start that the textbook was just his course notes, which he provided a PDF for, and we were welcome to (and encouraged) use the text as open-notes in our exams so long as we had a printed version of the notes.
The class proceeded to be one of my favorite math classes, and it was so incredible to have a text that was deeply integrated to the course--because it was just straight up what he lectured from. I wish more of my courses had been that way.
I went to San Jose state university a decade ago. It wasn't unexpected to find that some books could be bought there similarly where you pay for basically a photocopy bound with a spiral binding.
I also remember an expensive discrete math book. I came home for the holidays and was doing some exercises when my dad found his copy from when he was at university. Most sections were word for word idential, but the problems were all different. His had a chapter on Fortran too.
I was told they scramble the order of problems so they can keep the books the same but force you to buy new editions in order to have the same problem numbers at what gets assigned.
I had a class where the textbook did that. I always would get last year's books to save more than a few coins, but the professor of this class would go through the problems in-class, and they were all different from what was in my book. I went to his office hours to understand why the problems he went over were different from the ones in my book, and he immediately lectured "Ahhhh you must have bought an older book from the bargain bin. I require this year's book in my class and this is how I know who failed to pay for the correct book." The professor was the author of the book, of course. It was at that point it sunk in what a huge grift higher-education was.
I forgot the professor's name, but if you're reading this, fuck you, Dr. Shithead (and all the other Shithead professors who do this).
Incredible that this kind of corruption is tolerated in the credentials industry, most other industries would not tolerate someone making money from customers that way.
Can you imagine going to McDonalds and the guy won’t serve you your drink unless you buy a cup from his side business?
It's awful, and it's shameful but nobody feels shame anymore. The moral bar is "what can I legally get away with taking from the world" now. Nobody is even capable of feeling shame for their actions. It's just "bank account goes up" = "i'm right".
At my community college, the third semester of a three semester general physics course needed a new textbook, even though it covered substantially the same material. The prof explained why: his friends wrote this book. He was the only professor who taught the third course. That really prepared me for the experience once I transferred to a university.
I still remember my math teacher that specifically told us to get a certain version of the textbook, and the version he specified was 1 or 2 editions old. Ended up costing me something like $20 to buy used vs $100 new.
I would have gone to the book store, fotographed the two chapters. - When I was a university student, our professor would copy relevant chapters and hand them to us (in Berlin). We would only buy those books we used extensively.
That happens in the Unites States as well, especially when the professor doesn't stand to profit from book sales (and/or the author is long-dead) and the amount of reading is relatively small. I received a number of these kinds of stapled "books" over my undergraduate years. This included some from the author of one of the books in question.
I'm not sure it's fully on the up-and-up given intellectual property laws, but life is full of gray areas. At the time piracy was not the option it is today (no libgen or torrent sites, Usenet wasn't much help, and the web was sparkly-new), so those breaks were very much appreciated — especially for my classes in Attic Greek, where the relevant textbooks were now rare (though once very common) and unlikely to get much use outside of the class. We did have to buy the Loeb editions of a bunch of original texts (Greek on one side, translation on the other), but I have no issue with that, and they were readily available on the used market. I still have them.
You need to five-whys this before suggesting a solution. Start by asking whether whoever was in charge of requiring the $250 textbook benefited personally from its purchase.
Depends, I took economics modules at University, and that was the only subject where the mandatory course textbook was co-written by the module leader. Well, co-written is strong: they added ten exercise questions and some call out boxes to the default Pearson textbook. Naturally, it was 40% more expensive.
School and professor dependent. I had a few professors at UVA who authored the book being used in class.
I also had a few who made copies of the chapters they wanted from whatever books and had the library hold those copies for us. We would just check them out normally, make our own copy (or read, take notes) and return for the next person.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this feels like it'll cause even more issues. Today, clever students can share books, buy used, share electronic copies, or skip the book entirely if they don't think it's necessary. With this system, every student is forced to buy their textbook indirectly through tuition, which will of course rise significantly based on the cost of a textbook for an average class.
It's kind of like meal plans: when I went to college, meal plans were priced horribly, but you were forced to pay for at least a base meal plan, even if you lived off campus. It was just another way for the college to make money off of students who had no other choice. When meal plan prices rose $100 in a single year, or the college eliminated the previous cheapest meal plan, it's not like any students are going to transfer over a couple hundred dollars a semester. But it still sucked. Seems to me like bundling doesn't solve issues, it just reduces transparency and results in more "hidden fees" that might not show up in standard tuition costs.
That’s the thing, any mandatory costs (textbooks, meal plans, etc) should be bundled into the standard tuition price. It needs to be bundled into the top line price that people are actually aware of when they’re making their “purchase decision” (where to go to college)
As OP notes, though, textbooks aren't mandatory costs. A few classes will actually use the books extensively. Most others will deliver all the information in the lecture, with the textbook being referenced in the syllabus and never talked about again.
I'm an auditory learner who only ever used the books when there were homework problems out of them. I saved a ton of money in college by getting good at guessing which types of classes/professors would actually require the book, and I would not have appreciated seeing the books bundled with tuition.
I'd love for this to be a standard across ALL pricing, not just tuition. Any costs that I am required to pay should be put into the base price that is advertised.
The European Union broadly believes in this and to my understanding the situation is broadly 'better' here than in North America.
E.g. If I shop for plane tickets and I see a flight advertised for, say, 92 EUR I know that the price includes all taxes (sales taxes and airport taxes). Credit-card processing fees are (I think) no longer permitted.
It's not a perfect system - there are still the 'optional' extras (hold-bags, seat-bookings, insurance) extras on top of the price (and sometimes dark patterns to make you pay for them).
In a related matter, in the UK (not sure about the EU) there are advertising regulations which cover 'from' prices. I believe here if you advertise a price as 'from XXX' (e.g. 'flights to Berlin from 50 GBP') then at least 10% of the inventory needs to be available at that price. So no having a single seat on a 150 seat plane available at an artificially low price.
You might have chosen the worst example; the US regulations at ticket time are better for the customer.
The US "DOT requires airlines and travel agencies that display ticket prices to advertise the total price that a consumer must pay to purchase a ticket. Wherever an airfare is advertised, such as on a website, in an email, or during the booking process, the fare price must include all applicable government taxes and fees, and any mandatory carrier-imposed surcharges." Furthermore, if you're buying a ticket with an US segment 7 days or more from departure directly from an airline, the airline must typically "allow passengers to cancel their reservation within 24 hours and receive a full refund without a penalty."* This is something not afforded to customers on an intra-Europe flight.
*They can also offer a 24 hour hold free of charge, but the only airline that I know of that opts for this still allows the 24 hour cancel even after the hold.
That is a report that you can get / ask for - it is known as the cost of attendance. There is still some variation. For example, if you are a local you may not be required to live in the dorms and have a meal plan as a freshman.
> Your cost of attendance (COA) is an ESTIMATE of the expenses you might encounter while attending UW-Madison. Your COA includes more than just tuition and fees – see below. Most programs’ COAs are based on a full-time, nine-month enrollment period, unless otherwise noted. Although the actual cost of attending UW-Madison varies depending on your particular spending habits, the university bases your financial aid on your estimated COA.
but just like tuition, the overall price seems to be increasing across the (college) board, especially for the prestigious schools. this purchase decision stuff is not working.
>Today, clever students can share books, buy used, share electronic copies, or skip the book entirely if they don't think it's necessary.
I went back to college in the early 2010s. Even then it wasn't uncommon for a text book to come with a license code for an online learning module that was both required for classwork and non-transferable.
So yes, I could share the book, buy a used copy, or rip a PDF from an ebook, but that doesn't get me into the online class module that my professor is requiring for class, because that's hosted by the textbook's publisher and I don't get access unless I buy the book new.
I ran into this issue in the most unexpected of classes.
I took some vehicle repair courses as electives and there was an online module despite the majority of class time being spent in a shop environment doing actual work on vehicles.
I spent a lot of time in undergrad researching to find the books cheap online or buy the Indian paperback version that is only hardcover in the US. The oncampus bookstore gave peanuts when you sold it back and some profs were oblivious and would just require the newest version when the older version would work.
There needs to be a minimum amount of content that has materially changed in order to call it a new edition. Moving questions around and adding a word here or there is not cool.
You have a fair point, and that’s that tuition is another item where customers frequently don’t even shop on price. Many students decide on school with only a vague idea of price, some are on scholarship so they don’t pay, some are not that sophisticated with money so they just ignore the price and take out expensive loans for whatever they tell them to pay.
But the main reason why the idea would help is that colleges set tuition based on what they think the market will bear. The actual cost of the books though would be the school’s problem. Administration might actually pressure professors to NOT use custom self-authored editions that cost $200 more. Also, if the books are included, the school would want to buy used ones from any students who didn’t want to keep them, since it would save the school money. So they would be incentivized to tell professors to not switch to the yearly “new edition” which just resizes a few callout boxes each chapter in order to screw up the pagination, and randomly shuffles the exercises.
* note: I’m imagining here that tuition is set to a fixed amount for everyone just as it is today, not that everyone’s tuition is computed custom for them to include the books their particular professors picked.
How about a system like the one dutch highschools use. In that system, the students get the books from school at the start of the year and return them at the end of the year (the school owns the books). That way the books are for sure reused, and the price is reduced.
That's a bad idea; tuition is directly subsidized by student loans.
A better approach would be to allow student loan debt to be treated like any other debt during bankruptcy proceedings, as it was previously. It was only after bankruptcy protection was withheld from students that the student loan crisis and skyrocketing tuition became problems.
It's not like people used to file bankruptcy on graduation day just to screw over the system, so the changes to bankruptcy protection weren't actually addressing a real-world problem. Their only purpose is to shield institutions that are intentionally giving out bad loans.
Once that's done, sure, add textbooks to tuition. That way the university / student loan agency is taking on the risk that the book isn't worth potential future increases in the students' earnings.
Great idea, but that would lead to lenders making risk-based decisions on who gets what loans, and that would be politically untenable in the United States.
I may be a pessimist, but tackling the systemic issues that make loaning a bunch of money to an HBCU student much riskier than loaning a bunch of money to a Stanford student isn't what would happen. The demand would be equal outcomes (loans to all) without addressing why there's any disparity to begin with, which would lead to demands of some kind of guarantee the lender wouldn't be screwed over, which pretty much leads us back to where we are. Defaulting on a loan if you don't matriculate is a rational choice, especially since by definition those declaring bankruptcy aren't sacrificing much (they are almost certainly not in a position where bankruptcy would hugely impact their life in their 20's).
There would be pamphlets published on how to shed this debt. It would be a disaster for the lenders. Purely public funding probably can't work either, because to control costs you'd need to ensure students are prepared for higher education (likely via testing like everyone else in the world), and tests are already politically problematic in the United States.
Student loan is very different from most (all?) other types of debt - the collateral is inside the debtor's head. In other types of loans creditors can put a lien on some type of property - cars, houses, business, etc... For student loans there is no such recourse.
Student loans lost bankruptcy protection in 1976 [1]. Student loans became a crisis way later than that (I went to undergrad + master in late 90's, early 2000s and nobody was fretting about student loans. First I heard somethign about it was in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis).
I think student loan crisis is a combination of out of control tuition prices, low financial education on the debtors' side and predatory marketing techniques on the creditors' / colleges' side.
The student loan crisis is a cost of living crisis. The rent is too damn high. Room and board fees are a major portion of the total bill that everyone seems to ignore.
> It's not like people used to file bankruptcy on graduation day just to screw over the system
There used to be a social contract, where your country provided you with certain guarantees, and we felt some obligations in return. This was one of the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and also the founding of the USA. We abandoned that decades ago. Neoliberalism erased all "American values." The only American value left today is greed.
In that lost time, you're absolutely right: people would not have just bankrupted their loans on graduation day. College used to be affordable. The country provided for its people. There was a guarantee of a basic standard of living. You could raise a family as a single income household with just a high school diploma.
These days, no one can afford kids anymore. You need to have a Master's degree just to afford a crappy one bedroom apartment downtown. If you fall down, there is no rock bottom. Skid Row in LA has been described by the UN as more deprived than anything they saw in refugee camps or Brazilian favelas. US tent cities are gross violations of human rights. The decadent ruling class openly mocks the idea that human rights even exist in the first place, only pretending to acknowledge such things when manufacturing consent for war with Russia. You have no right to life, no right to liberty, no right to the pursuit of happiness. You will own nothing, and you will be happy (or else).
In this Brave New World, where the social contract has long been shredded and there's no such thing as society anyway, absolutely everyone would declare bankruptcy on graduation day if they could. Just like all the criminal business owners walked away from $4 trillion of fraudulent PPP loans they didn't need. Just like Jeff Bezos takes every legal tax deduction he can find and more, despite not needing them. I would declare bankruptcy on Graduation Day. You would, too. You would have to be an imbecile not to. In this world, you take what you can get as long as it's legal. If you find a loophole in the system, you exploit it unapologetically.
JFK's most famous quote was widely applauded at the time: "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." The underlying implication there is, the country already did a lot for its people back then. Half a century later, all these years of all take and no give, it's about time we started asking the reverse. America's Human Resources are all tapped out. No more blood left to draw from these stones. What has this country ever done for you? When has it ever given you a single dime back, in return for all the taxes you've paid? Even universal healthcare is too much to give for them, but they'll give Ukraine everything and more. They'll fund their universal healthcare system, their pensions, and all the things the oligarchs have stolen from us. The child tax credit cut child poverty in half overnight, but American oligarchs are demons, they enjoy seeing kids going hungry. It's good for business or something.
It will take another generation or two before your theory is true again -- that people wouldn't just declare bankruptcy to start adulthood at zero. You'd need to fully rebuild the social democracy that has been systematically destroyed piece by piece ever since black people got human rights in the 1960s. Even if we got FDR's Second Bill of Rights enacted tomorrow, young people have been completely broken by this Hellworld we've raised them in. They've been forced to ritually practice their own deaths on every equinox in these truly disgusting school shooter drills every year of their lives, since they were in preschool. Part of rebuilding that underlying social democracy would have to be making public university free again. There's no way around it. Either it's free again via declaring bankruptcy on graduation day, in some sort of quasi-baptism in the civil religion, or it's via direct funding as it was before higher education was desegregated. Honestly, I kinda prefer the graduation day jubilee. It begs the question, why don't we just reset all the debt? It would delegitimize the entire system of debt that enslaves the human race.
Most of the professors I've had taught the course entirely with free materials. I think they went out of their way to avoid having students spend money. A top-down policy forcing all students to buy textbooks sounds like a way to take control away from these professors in order to further enrich the school and the publishers at students' expense.
I don't view textbook costs as a "dark pattern", they're an honest signal from the professor to the students. A professor who makes a $250 book mandatory and then barely uses it sends one kind of signal. A professor who goes out of their way to hunt down (or even scan) and provide free PDFs for all required readings sends another. Students receive these signals and they're reflected in professors' online ratings. To the extent possible (which is a large extent for some highly flexible programs, such as mine), students will go out of their way to drop and swap classes to avoid unpopular professors, further incentivizing faculty to keep these ancillary costs down.
> A professor who makes a $250 book mandatory and then barely uses it sends one kind of signal. A professor who goes out of their way to hunt down (or even scan) and provide free PDFs for all required readings sends another.
My memory may be fading away, but what I remember is that many professors provided their lecture in a kind of written form (written by them or their assistants, not copied from books), at cost to copy. No book required in addition.
A lecture that follows a book seems weird. Why a lecture, just read the book?
Exactly, lets take it a step further and forbid selling (teaching) things you don't own.
If I desire to charge people to teach them what an array is I must provide the explanation of the array myself.
If the book is really to good to skip a teaching license must be acquired that names the specific chapters and their purpose. The rights holder doesn't have to sell by chapter but if anyone wants to make a more specific version at a better price they can.
Ideally work towards a single book for each year with a wiki for educators to debate changes and updates.
This is indeed a nice idea, unfortunately the university (mine) gets kick backs from the book store. At the beginning of every semester every faculty gets an email asking us to 'encourage' students to buy their materials at the book store. Every semester I do what I always do and tell the students that the ($250!) book will not be used in class (although mine is just one in a sequence and the book is chosen by the whole department for the whole sequence) and give a half a dozen references to (excellent) free online books. Even then some students for whom the class is the terminal one in a sequence buy their books. Must be human nature at play. On a different note, as a flight instructor, when a future student asks me what to bring to the intro flight, I usually say 'lunch', since I provide everything else, including headsets. Yet half of them bring $500 worth of useless gadgets and expensive books (not, strangely enough, headsets) to 'be prepared'.
When I studied my engineering degree (not in the US) at a pretty high-ranked institution, textbooks were rarely used. I think I only actually purchased and used one, and it was approx $50 (brand new, used was cheaper). Often a course text was set, alongside the instruction of "don't bother to use it" (!) One prof did use his own book (the only time I saw this) for teaching, and had uploaded the book as PDF chapters (searchable text format, no less) to the online course page.
I therefore have a double-take when I read about people spending upwards of $1000 for books in a semester - I just can't imagine what that course would be like, or how students would feel with that kind of teaching that is presumably very heavily reliant on the book.
> Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.
As a former textbook seller, professors will exploit this for profit by publishing their own textbook at inflated prices and collecting a nice reward. This does happen in some places (or did, I'm out of the industry).
Imagine if every state or country developed their own open source curriculum, instead of allowing publishers to exists as owners and gatekeepers of knowledge.
Couple of points, which as a former seller I suspect you know, but students often do not.
1) There is no best book for a subject. What suits a class in Elementary Statistics in one place or program might be all wrong for another.
2) There's a lot more to developing texts (or, as you say, curriculum) than people think. Besides a book, there are exercises and answers to the exercises. There are in class slides, perhaps programming components, and the elephant in the room is integration with the most popular LMSs. And all this has to be kept up to date.
It really requires money. At least in the US, I'm unaware of funding.
I'm an Open Text author so I'm sympathetic to your thoughts but it proves to be complex, IMHO
It's complex, but it's that what governments exist for? Solving large complex problems for the greater good?
1) Totally agree, there needs to be competition and humility to say, "Hey our regions Math book is inferior, let's use X".
2) Absolutely and I don't mean to dismissively hand wave away the hard work that will be required ("just code the app" is a good comparison) but rather trying to simply state another direction to take.
It requires money, but I think less than many suspect (without the publishers margins!). But the investment would pay for itself and would be a good _start_ to tackling the inflated costs of education.
> It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing.
But it doesn't. What incentivizes people in power right now is the AirBnB and TicketMaster fee schedules. That's why we have those things.
You can describe a better solution, one you could enact if you got into power, but you might never be allowed to get into power because you have that idea as a solution. The policy makes the power structure less than the power structure determines policy.
I would argue to you that piracy is the power structure answer to poor incentive structures in academia.
Do you think we would have experienced streaming as it is today without the piracy of old?
Unbundling who the money is paid to is part of the reason this happens. It's socially forbidden for professors, who are white-collar workers, to ask for tips, so making you buy a book you never use of which they get, say, 30% of the price is the only way they can divert more money into their pocket from that of the students. Just see it as a "mandatory service fee".
Universities could solve these problems in many ways, including just having a price-cap on student textbooks.
That the problem continues isn't because the right tweak hasn't been tried but because university administrators allow this situation. The reason they allow the situation is both that they some material interest in it but also because the administrators and funders of the university operate with an ideology that sees markets inherently as a solution to problems.
The concept of using endless debt to pay an escalating price for privatized knowledge is the epitome of efficient use of resources in this view. And your idea of rebundling the costs certainly would change the regime if it somehow got tried.
I work in this field, and this is already a thing. It’s somewhat euphemistically called “inclusive textbooks” because the price is already included in your fees. The price is typically significantly lower than you would pay individually because they know that they’re forcing everyone to pay instead of just the subset of students who would choose to pay if given a choice.
I guess the question is whether the students as a group pay more over all. If not, it feels like a sneaky way for the school and textbook publishers to charge an extra fee for textbooks. It's a fee everyone has to pay, and which the schools control the rate of. And if not having to pay for it directly means that people stop paying attention, the price could slowly crept up to previous levels, and relatively few people would even notice. I mean, obviously no university would ever do something so greedy, so this is of course a purely theoretical proposition...
I imagine the overall revenue is greater than if students were given the choice to purchase or not. I've talked with recent college grads who purchased 1-2 textbooks during all four years, and who indicate this is common at their college. The discount given for "inclusive textbook" programs is substantial, but I don't think it is substantial enough to outweigh the fact that many students choose to purchase textbooks only once in a blue moon.
There are "new model" institutions that are doing that. I got my BSCS from Western Governors. Tuition covered everything. Books, certifications, etc. Any material I wanted beyond the course text was either available in their digital library or I would search for used to get a dirt cheap price on an older edition.
My partner is doing her degree now and her institution, in two cases... a math course and biology course, opted to use OpenStax text books. After looking through them, I liked them enough that I pick up the print editions for sub-$40 new and use them for refreshing things.
I went to University of Wisconsin-Platteville and they had a book center on campus with every book for every class. "Rental" costs were part of tuition (and something like $300/semester -- ridiculously low).
The idea of having to source these books is mostly foreign to me, though many of my friends went through it. I never did, and still do not, understand why this isn't a thing everywhere...
I attend a school that bundles books and a laptop into tuition. It's honestly a god send and when i want to keep a book i can just go online and buy a cheaper used version. Plus, the discontinued books get sold by the school for $2 each. Most of them are just management and accounting stuff I'm not interested but I've built up a pretty significant biology and chemistry library for less than $30.
And this is the cheapest college in the state for me. It really emphasizes how lots of the cost of college is just the fancy name on the diploma.
The bundle would be too hard to pull off IMO. How is my 100k of debt going to cover all these administrative employees, the new climbing wall AND some books?
Here's another weird idea, make everything older than 10yr free to digitally reproduce.
We cannot be funding things that are not truly new. I know that textbooks are well known for having multiple editions that pretty much just scramble the pages, but students should be able to map books around, and I bet that professors can also point out to the pages on older editions.
On the subject of morals and text books: In Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman he talks about serving on a committee to select a new text book for a school.
"""
A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said, "We're ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred pounds."
I was overwhelmed.
"It's all right, Mr. Feynman; we'll get someone to help you read them."
I couldn't figure out how you do that: you either read them or you don't read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with the elementary schoolbooks.
"""
So right away we see the text book business is bullshit because the peddler has an established business of helping others review the books, but as Feynman asks, how do you actually do that? How do you help someone read and review a text book?
Later:
"""
Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, "Why did you rate that book low?" I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page so-and-so – I had my notes.
They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every rating.
I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would say, "Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book." I would never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept asking me what I thought.
We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.
I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."
Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?"
"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."
The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet. There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late."
It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn't believe it was blank, because [the book] had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.
"""
This is a very very poor idea that binds advanced students to the standard of a place.
This is very elitist and will deepen the divide.
If you are a really smart individual in a bad college due to your socio economic situations, you need to be able to read what MIT students are reading and not your below average peers are reading.
> It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing.
How so? At that point it's a small cost buried (read: hidden) in much larger cost. Who is going to go to the mat for "the kidz" if no one is going to notice the savings?
Sounds like we have to peacefully protest until Citizens United gets overturned so the publishers can't just out lobby/spend us. Then continue peacefully protesting to change the tuition/book cost structure.
Totally realistic set of goals, but until then I'll be pirating.
Don't try to externalize blame when it falls squarely on University Executives and Administrators.
Their primary focus seems to be empire building: Create as many admin positions under me in the Org Chart as I can get away with and extract as much money from students as possible to fund the growth of my empire.
This has been allowed to happen because they have essentially unlimited access to funding, no accountability and can make hand wave arguments about needing more staff (DEI, etc.)
Wrong, at least in my experience. Professors with published books wanted us to buy those books for their course. They would just pass the cost (from which they profit) back to the student if they were bundling, with no alternative to the student.
> Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.
I think that's how it's done in the UK? I don't remember paying out the wazoo for my course books. If I did have to pay it would have been some nominal amount.
Every once in a while it turns out that it's just a really good book. Gilbert Strang's books were like that. He actually revised them between editions. I mean some editions are totally reorganized. You could tell he did it because he thought the material could be better presented, not just because he could make more money on a new edition.
It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market.
The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a product(education via tuition) and choices are made for you(textbook selection) that you have to pay for in order to pass the class(see the realization of tuition). That's fundamentally broken market mechanics.
The folks in charge of making the market decision(which textbook to use) should be the same ones paying for it. We have a term for this pattern - moral hazard, and we shouldn't be surprised when students continue the same pattern of behavior when the system continues unchanged.