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States are moving to cut college costs by introducing open-source textbooks

• exhilaration 10y ago
  While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators: By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...
  • Chaebixi 10y ago
    > While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators: Exploitative textbook pricing is also a problem that needs to be solved, and its unproductive to pass up lower-hanging fruit just to focus a higher one.
  • ashark 10y ago
    How much of this is because there's more personal risk involved in cutting a budget than spending too much? Like, who in their right mind would cut any sort of counseling? One suicide and you're in trouble, whether or not it makes sense. Diversity-promoting staff? You know the second you look at that budget sideways your school will be in the news for some asshole senior wearing blackface at a party, and your name will be in the resulting national stories as the guy who cut that budget. Better increase it just to be safe. Predatory lending hits the news again and your school's on a Bottom 10 list for financial counselors per capita that's published in USA Today? Yikes. And so on, and so on, for many far more mundane things. You cut anything and any performance or enrollment metric takes a hit (and gets press)? Or sports, and The Team does poorly the next season? Oh man. Hope you have a good severance package. Way more personal pressure to increase budgets than decrease them at schools, I'd think. Cut something and anything sort-of related to it goes wrong whether or not the cuts caused it you will be in for a rough time. It's really easy to point at spending levels and increases when someone asks if you've "done anything" about some issue. [EDIT] because this is the Internet I guess I should state explicitly that no, I'm not against psychological counseling for students or anti-diversity or anything like that, that's just the kind of thing that sometimes makes the news and if there's anyone we can justify blaming for any reason, we definitely will, so I picked those as examples.
  • losteric 10y ago
    College enrollment has been growing as our nation absurdly stigmatizes not going. Lecturing scales well and doesn't mandate growing tenured faculty, but poor technology leads schools to hire more paper pushers.
  • rahimnathwani 10y ago
    You're talking about a colleges' costs, whereas the original article is talking about students' costs. You have the causality backwards. An increase in # administrators isn't responsible for the increase in students' costs (primarily through tuition fees). An increase in administrators is enabled by an increase in tuition fees received by schools.
    • ende 10y ago
      If tuitions were increased for the purpose of increasing administrators, then yes, the later caused the former.
    • T-hawk 10y ago
      This is correct. People arguing otherwise are misunderstanding capitalism. Tuition doesn't go up because administrators need to be paid. Tuition goes up because the market will pay it. The administrators are the result of the profit margin of tuition, not the cause. It's the same argument that sports tickets cost so much because the players get paid so much. That is backwards. Ticket price rises to the level that the audience will pay, and then that determines how much money is available to pay players.
• ythn 10y ago
  Somehow I doubt this. You think publishers are just going to sit back and let this happen? Either publishers will lobby against this, or they will force exclusivity contracts with universities so that "open source" books are banned.
  • pjc50 10y ago
    Cynical, but I don't think people should be downvoting this comment. It's obviously a real risk.
  • debacle 10y ago
    Publishers are already lobbying against this. It's far cheaper to buy a department head or professor than it is to buy legislation.
  • singhrac 10y ago
    I don't think I quite understand - what would lobbying against the creation of open textbooks do exactly? What kind of law could be passed that could prevent that? I guess they might have enough leverage with professor/universities to force exclusivity contracts, but I would like to hear about examples.
  • jcadam 10y ago
    Perhaps publishers could target the accreditation boards for their bribery? A requirement that all university textbooks go through some ridiculous vetting/approval process so onerous and expensive that only the major publishers could possibly afford it might do the trick (and of course the associated costs could just be passed on to students).
• debacle 10y ago
  One of the biggest reasons I am dismissive of the "free tuition" change in NYS for SUNY schools is the massive cost associated with college that isn't tuition. Ignoring room and board, tuition is still only ~50% of the cost of college. Fees can be massive (I was paying 2k+ a year in fees 10 years ago), text books are exorbitant, and that doesn't consider all the ancillary costs for lab supplies, etc.
  • burntwater 10y ago
    So since you can't (yet) get it completely for free, you'd rather just pay the full 100%?
    • pchristensen 10y ago
      If it's branded as "free college", then students will have the wrong impression when they're planning, and the politicians that deliver it can pat themselves on the back more than they deserve.
  • wtvanhest 10y ago
    It needs to be attacked from all angles.
• georgeecollins 10y ago
  When I went to UCSD (a long time ago) the standard engineering calculus book was revised every other year, usually changing all the homework problems, destroying the used market for it. It was written by the chair of the department. In that way the professors and the book publishers had an interest in keeping the price of textbooks very high.
  • xur17 10y ago
    I had a professor in college that explicitly told us to get an old version of the textbook. It ended up costing ~$8 on Amazon instead of $80 for the newest version. My physics class on the other hand had a book that was 'customized' for us (chapters were rearranged to prevent resale), and we had to purchase access to webassign.
    • softawre 10y ago
      I am thankful that I went to college just early enough to miss this forced internet assignment crap.
    • kwhitefoot 10y ago
      The behaviour of US universities when it comes to text books is astonishing to me. When I studied physics in the UK in the mid seventies such behaviour would have caused massive student protests. Now there are courses in the UK that have no textbooks at all and are based entirely on laboratory work, lectures, and on line study. In fact when I studied there was no real requirement to buy books at all. Of course most of us did spend a lot on books but it was nothing compared to the amounts I regularly see mentioned on line in discussions about US unis. It was simply convenient to use the recommended book so that lecturers could refer to chapters, formulas, and figures and so on and so that when you asked your fellow students for help that you would all be on the same page so to speak. In theory you could have got by with your own lecture notes and visits to the library. I'm quite sure that my old copy of Lorrain and Corson would be just as good for EM part of a bachelor's in physics now as it was in 1975. In fact I think I'll dig it out and start to refresh my skills.
  • greeneggs 10y ago
• EGreg 10y ago
  This should be done at the same time as flipping the classroom! http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
• sddfd 10y ago
  As someone from a country with a fixed book price agreement, the pricing of college text books in the U.S. seems criminal to me.
  • yoran 10y ago
    You poor man, living in a socialist country... (sarcastic of course)
• carsongross 10y ago
  While I appreciate the token nod towards controlling costs, and the text book scam is a mark of shame that the professoriate class should be deeply embarrassed by, this is a bit like tending to the deep cut on your hand while your severed leg spurts blood in cadence with your fading heartbeat.
  • snarf21 10y ago
    Exactly this. College books is a scam but the $500 you pay a semester isn't the reason college costs $50K per year. This seems a PR move to say they are trying something but like most things. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
  • mikebelanger 10y ago
    You're right, in the scheme of things it doesn't bring down a college education cost that much. But it's one of the relatively simpler ways of reducing the overall cost.
• djent 10y ago
  My college just started pushing this as well, but missed an important point: some professors already use Creative Commons textbooks. I'm currently using one in my proofwriting class - and my professor demanded we have a print copy. I've only taken one computer science course that required a non-free book, and that was because the professor was the author.
  • Jtsummers 10y ago
    What free texts are used instead of, say, Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, et al or Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation? There are some really good non-free texts, I'm genuinely curious what the free alternatives are and how they compare.
    • hackermailman 10y ago
      DPV was a really good 'free' undergrad algorithms text until the publisher demanded the author's stop giving it away https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/ https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/ "Algorithms with Sanjoy Dasgupta (Christos Papadimitriou) and Umesh Vazirani, McGraw-Hill 2006. Note: until recently, we had here the pdf of an early version of this book, for the convenience of the students. Unfortunately, our publisher demanded that we delete it. Advice to authors: (a) make sure you keep the copyright, and (b) do not publish with McGraw Hill."
• JustFinishedBSG 10y ago
  I think here ( France ) our profs are required to write a "textbook" for their class. We get a lot of awesome free material as a result.
  • hocuspocus 10y ago
    I think you should elaborate a bit since it might not be clear to US readers. College professors (collaboratively) write teaching materials that are copied and bound by the print shop of your school. Nowadays they're typically freely available in PDF, to registered students at least. Nothing like American textbooks sold over $100 by big publishing companies.
• ReverseCold 10y ago
  "open source"
• chrismealy 10y ago
  America could cut college costs by a quarter by making undergrad degrees take three years instead of four.
  • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Actually, we should be expanding Vo Tech education. Not everyone needs or should go to college, but we need good alternatives for those people.
    • wccrawford 10y ago
      In the area I was from, VoTech was so looked down upon that I never even considered going to one of those schools. I can't help but think that attitude stops a lot of people from considering them, even if they're perfectly adequate for the career they want.
    • ganoushoreilly 10y ago
      I would argue that beyond that traditional college bound paths should transition to more of a vo-tech (which is a bad term in academia) path. Look at CS curriculum or anyone learning anything with a semblance of Security. Most of the talent there is lacking hands on experience, instead students spend 4 years learning a text book methodology only to find out that in the real world the text book method isn't always possible or right. I'm seeing more and more of my peers care less about a degree and more about quantifiable experience. I'd rather have a mid talent coder that's flexible and understand the larger problem set we're solving than someone highly skilled in algorithmic design (which is something i've seen).
  • munificent 10y ago
    We could cut costs by 100% by having no classes at all! Of course, you would also reduce learning by an equivalent amount...
    • thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > you would also reduce learning by an equivalent amount... Can you justify this claim? It's easy to observe that current students who take the same classes differ in the amount of learning they do. I see no reason to believe that different students taking the same class schedule consisting of 0 classes would suddenly all learn the same amount. It seems more likely that they would continue to differ in the amount of learning they do.
• darkengine 10y ago
  When I was at Oregon State (a couple years ago), all my math and econ classes used "My{Math,Econ}Lab" as homework. Meaning, if you chose not to or could not pay for Pearson's infamous Flash-based "web" app (which I had to spin up a Windows VM to run), you could not pass the class. It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.
  • Cerium 10y ago
    At San Jose State we used "Mastering Physics" which we could only purchase a licence to by buying a new unopened textbook. It was an infuriating piece of software that would mark your answers completely wrong unless they were EXACTLY right.
    • neuromantik8086 10y ago
      If they aren't exactly right, how can you claim to be a physics master though?
      • ambicapter 10y ago
        Because "Mastering Physics" doesn't know jack shit about being a "physics master" by any stretch of the imagination.
        • throwaway18917 10y ago
          I... I think it was a joke.
          • neuromantik8086 10y ago
            You are a Humor Master!
    • aphextron 10y ago
      What would you say about your experience with SJSU engineering in general? It's one of my top 5 schools right now.
• tehlike 10y ago
  seems like the best way to get college education at a cheaper cost is sending kids to other countries for education. I am saying this as a non-american resident of the US. You could use the extra money as a seed for the child's potential business ideas, if any.
  • thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Your comment assumes that the goal of sending a kid to college is to have them learn some body of knowledge. A more common goal is acculturation and networking, which sending them to a foreign school will actively work against.
    • tehlike 10y ago
      Is that so? You could argue living in another country brings the similar benefit. Though i agree that united states is pretty diverse from schools pov.
• sn9 10y ago
  I'm really surprised Dover books aren't more common.
• ende 10y ago
  publishers : professors :: pharma : doctors
• awch 10y ago
  I often wish there existed a 'student course materials bill of rights'. At a minimum, it would require professors to indicate which version(s) of the texts are acceptable, and would require them to provide this information ~2 weeks before the start of the term, allowing students time to order used books online. The current-1 edition of a textbook, purchased used on Amazon, is often 25-50% of the cost of the new textbook in the college bookstore... Of course, open-source textbooks would be even better.
• ergo14 10y ago
  Heh, in my country we had state funded open source textbooks. Then right wing took over and they scrapped everything just like that.
• ravenstine 10y ago
  This is wonderful! Though I can't believe that Openstax wasn't mentioned. For those interested in some excellent free & open source textbooks, look up Openstax.org. I sometimes read through chapters for the heck of it. My only wish is that they are made available for Kindle. Really makes me sad to look back at my college education and think of all the money I spent on textbooks of comparable quality.
  • Steuard 10y ago
    OpenStax is a really cool project, I agree. (https://openstax.org/ https://openstax.org/) It's organized by Rice University, with support from big name foundations like Gates and Hewlitt. The textbooks are free online, or campus bookstores can order print copies more or less at cost (as I recall). I've done some peer review work for chapters of their recently released University Physics book. My main complaint is that their books are (intentionally) completely traditional in content and format: they're designed to be maximally easy for a "standard" existing course to switch to (since professors are often reluctant to throw out years of work in polishing their lectures). That means in particular that if you want a more modern textbook redesigned from the ground up based on (e.g.) physics education research, you're still stuck asking your students to pay big bucks for it. Also, one negative observation I've seen as a chapter reviewer, at least for this particular text: by their very nature, these textbooks aren't the result of one passionate author with a cohesive vision and voice. They're written chapter by chapter by a variety of authors under a central project management team. So while the content winds up being solid (I hope), the text itself isn't really much fun to read. (Not that most textbooks do especially well in that department! But there are some good ones that do, and that can pay off for the class.)
    • SSLy 10y ago
      Now, which are the new and fancy textbooks that you've mentioned?
      • Steuard 10y ago
        Tom Moore's Six Ideas That Shaped Physics is one of my favorites. It upends the traditional order of topics in an intro physics class: it starts with conservation laws rather than F=ma, both because they're more fundamental (you're not going to use F=ma in quantum mechanics, but you'll sure use energy) and because students taking calculus concurrently will have learned about derivatives there by the time you get to acceleration and really need to start understanding them. Lots of other pedagogically novel features, too. Another favorite of mine that might be especially interesting to the HN crowd is Chabay and Sherwood's Matter and Interactions text. One key feature is its tight integration of simulations using "VPython", which students start to use within the first few weeks of class. That makes it viable to have students study realistic forces rather than just the simplest cases. (E.g. adding air resistance to projectile motion is just one more line of code, rather than requiring a course in differential equations.) That also makes it more reasonable for their book to give true equations from the start (like the equation for relativistic momentum rather than just p=mv) and then state the more familiar forms as approximations. Randall Knight's Physics for Scientists and Engineers is a much more standard text than those two, but it's still worlds better than most traditional texts that I've used: it changes the old standards in smaller ways, but still incorporating lots of research-based improvements. (Knight's little book /Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching/ was a great introduction to Physics Education Research for me when I first started teaching, too.) Eric Mazur, one of the real leaders of the Physics Education Research community, wrote a book not long ago called /Principles and Practice of Physics/. I haven't had a chance to really go through it in detail yet to get a feel for everything that makes it unique (one big structural change from tradition is that he focuses on students getting rock solid on 1D physics before introducing the complications of vectors), but he's such an expert in this stuff that I wouldn't want to leave his book off of the list. (It's organized in a bit of a weird way, mind you.) I'm sure there are others that I haven't thought to list. Debora Katz has a new book that I just heard about that emphasizes case studies, for example. But yeah: almost any of these books are fundamentally different than the classics in some way, and worlds better in my opinion.
• mrfusion 10y ago
  I wonder when more product classes might go open source? It's been such a hit with software I wonder why more products haven't popped up? What are your ideas for products that might someday have a successful open source version?
• fnordfnordfnord 10y ago
  My .edu employer "encourages" faculty to use texts supplied by the campus BN franchise. As mentioned by /u/darkengine Pearson and Blackboard have their claws in as well. In my experience, most faculty simply take the lowest friction route.
• ourmandave 10y ago
  My daughter starts in the fall and during recent campus tours the advice on the down low from the tour guide has been to get ebooks on-line and Never Buy From The Campus Store. They also mention Amazon's text book rental (but I haven't done any price comparisons on that).
• taifff 10y ago
  https://www.pearson.com/corporate/news/media/news-announcements/2017/04/pearson-and-chegg-announce-partnership-to-make-textbooks-more-af.html https://www.pearson.com/corporate/news/media/news-announceme... Pearson and Chegg Announce Partnership to Make Textbooks More Affordable for College Students. imo, Pearson is really evil, I live in Taiwan and still lots of classes in the top universities use Pearson textbooks, and lots of students pay for their solutions on Chegg, which makes it all more absurd.
• wolfkill 10y ago
  It is my opinion that 1) We continue to need new textbooks: Despite relative little change in core materials for subjects like Calculus, there is a need for adaptation of texts to include current applications and methods. 2) The best use of interactive media to complement and enhance learning is yet to be determined. 3) The worst crime of textbook companies is lack of innovation.
• hyperion2010 10y ago
  I find it laughable that people think that $1500 a year (ballpark) is 'cutting costs' when annual tuition is on the order of $50,000. That is an order of magnitude of difference. Maybe students care about it because it is the only cost they really feel, but come on, these efforts are marginal at best. I thinking open textbooks are an incredibly important initiative, but they don't make a meaningful dent in college costs.
  • kevinnk 10y ago
    Average annual state University tuition for residents is more like 10k. Cutting 10-15% of that doesn't seem marginal to me.
    • SaintGhurka 10y ago
      California residents currently pay $46 per unit for community college courses. A $250 textbook might be the biggest expense of the class.
• thearn4 10y ago
  I'm teaching a data structures class w/java this coming fall semester, and am putting together a reference text/notes in markdown to provide for free, since it seems really silly to require a paid text for this stuff. Every single item that contributes to the learning objectives of this course is incredibly Google-able, but as new students to the field, they do need at least some curation and direction to keep from getting overwhelmed. They need a reference resource that they can trust which is academic enough to be true, yet reasonably conversational. Textbooks used to fill this role, but publishers priced and walled-gardened themselves out of relevance. Side note: if you're an professor who has done something like this in the past, I'd love to compare notes with you.
  • jpolitz 10y ago
    I'm basing my course this quarter on one from Northeastern, where Ben Lerner has written a pretty impressive set of notes, the latter half of which are data structures content: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs2510/Lectures.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs2510/Lectures.html The NEU course assumes that students have taken How to Design Programs in Racket, so the early notes refer to Racket syntax. I'm working on notes for a Racket-less introduction that uses the same tools for my course right now: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp17/cse11-a/Lectures.html https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp17/cse11-a/Lectures.html These notes also rely on a particularly good testing library that is capable of doing things like comparing objects for structural equality without requiring that students define a .equals() method first, which can be incredibly helpful for getting off the ground.
• antisthenes 10y ago
  This is bikeshedding at its finest. Textbooks were a minor, tiny part of the total cost of attending college. When you put the cost of books next to tuition, room and board and opportunity cost of not attending college, it's barely noticeable. I probably spent no more than $250 on books per semester (less on average, thanks to used books and online materials). This is almost as comical as a hypothetical scenario of putting public terminals in health clinics that point you to WebMD, in an attempt to cut medical costs in the US.
  • sathackr 10y ago
    The local public state college I attended was roughly $150/credit hour. So about $1800/semester was my cost. Books were up to $300 per class. Sometimes I could find a used one, but often it was a previous "edition" which didn't quite match the teacher's latest edition. I spent around $500/semester in books, sometimes less, sometimes more. Which is about 1/4 of my total cost(yes I know the actual tuition was subsidized)
    • antisthenes 10y ago
      Guess my university was just better at giving options for accessing the material. A good ~30% of the classes didn't even require books (lectures and chapters were available online), and the other 60% you could easy get used books for half the cost. The last 10% were classes where you had to buy a "workbook", which were only available new, but they didn't come anywhere close to $300, maybe 80-100.
  • thomastjeffery 10y ago
    Just because the problem that millions of Americans around you have does not reflect your own experience, does not make it any less real. Even if you attend a college with an absurdly expensive tuition, there are plenty of students who attend with a scholarship that covers it, and nothing else. Textbooks are, for the vast majority of college attendees, a major expense. Required textbooks are simply immoral. They only benefit the publisher.
  • BeetleB 10y ago
• BlackjackCF 10y ago
  Good. All those horrible, predatory textbook companies need to die.
• zekevermillion 10y ago
  This is encouraging. I strongly believe that public schools at all levels should (as in, morally ought to) use freely available coursework. Not only does it remove one more way in which kids are sorted by economic class, but it also teaches them something about the "system" in a meta way that could be as useful as any other particular subject, in itself. But I can see the major roadblock to this, which is just that it is damned hard to create a curriculum in any subject that will meet all internal and state requirements.
  • snarf21 10y ago
    I think that is actually the answer. If you look at the cost to pay some huge companies to create a curriculum and how much money all the publishers and their sales people make, it seems pretty clear why it is so expensive. Why not just have the Department of Education of each state create a curriculum that is free for all schools in the state to use? All books would be sold at cost to schools in that state (plus the state could make them digital). Each school would be allowed to buy alternate books and do their own curriculum but at their own costs. School boards will take this easy road to cost savings. There is also no reason it can't be done at the federal level too and states can pick and choose which parts they want of the federal curriculum to save costs. The problem with universities is that the $50K price tag means the costs of books isn't that relevant overall. Additionally, lots of professors use books they wrote because it is about publishing not teaching. Universities want to point to all of their faculty who are "known" and "published" so they are not incentivized to cut this cost. Also, they want to be different and unique to justify their fees. The only schools who can afford to give away curriculum are the Ivy Leagues that have so much endowments they don't even need the money. Plus it helps their reputation for the (mostly) online schools that use their classes.
    • zekevermillion 10y ago
      Yes, two different scenarios state primary/secondary, and university. Regarding state universities, while true many subsist on tuition there are some notable exceptions -- for example, the UT system has one of the largest endowments of any university (public or private). I would argue however, that it's the small and modestly endowed schools that can take the lead here. If one doesn't care too much about cracking the elite rankings of the Ivies etc, then it's not so much publish or perish. The schools can afford to hire teachers as well as more commercially successful researches who attract grant money. For example, I took freshman calculus at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. The professors at the time primarily used a weekly photocopied handout to teach calculus, and it worked quite well. I later attended Columbia ($$$) which had some great researches but did a terrible job teaching calculus (b/c the teacher was not interested in teaching) and used a shiny textbook plus a half-assed "lab" that mostly involved fixing typos in Matlab programs under severe time pressure.
• jimhefferon 10y ago
  I've been offering a math text that is open source (LaTeX on GitLab) for many years, since 1995. I have had the good fortune to work at a college that gave me professional activity credit for this. Writing a text, well, is a major piece of work. The text body takes a lot, writing good exercises takes every bit as much, the answers to the exercises are important, and so also are ancillary material such as classroom slides. People respond to rewards and unless they get rewarded for this it is not going to happen nearly enough. If you are an alum, and have some contact with your college or university, please urge them to give people credit for this. Say its important.
• EliRivers 10y ago
  I recall back at the turn of the century, I genuinely think none of my classes had a required textbook. I know that some did recommend books that could be used for extra depth, but that's all they were. Everything in the exam would have been explained by the professor in their own words and drawing, at the front. I've still got the set of notes from some of them; no textbooks involved. Question sets were photocopied bits of paper. This was in the UK; I can't speak for how common this system is in the UK, but it sure feels like some people are getting massively ripped off. Clue's in the title, surely; you're a professor? Profess things :) A few years ago, I did a Masters in Maths in my evenings and weekends, for the fun of it, and that was to a large extent "get this textbook, make sure you can answer all these question, see you in nine months for the exam" with a few phone calls and weekends face-to-face thrown in. Whole thing cost a few thousand pounds. If you're just learning from the books, the actual cost of the education is so much smaller.
• Tloewald 10y ago
  Good. Why start at college? I am amazed that we don't have open source textbooks and materials created cooperatively across the entire education system.
• enknamel 10y ago
  This is great and all but textbooks for me, while expensive, were nowhere close to my tuition cost. I'd love to see some traction on tuition cost reduction. I know that's trickier but hey, Amdahl's Law.
• webninja 10y ago
  I pray that the quality of textbooks won't go down if they're reduced to free. I know the textbook industry is a racket but I don't know many PH.D.'s who expect to work for free. What if textbooks end up being funded by agenda-pushing corporate advertising?