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i think this is one area where price caps actually make sense: college text books and college tuitions. Just make it illegal for public colleges to charge more
by throw8383833jj 4y ago
i think this is one area where price caps actually make sense: college text books and college tuitions. Just make it illegal for public colleges to charge more than a certain amount.
as for text books, we need to encourage professors to reuse the same text book for at least 5 or 10 years. that will increase the resale value of the books. or better yet, have universities rent out books at some minor fee that they can recoup over 10 years.
- Spartan-S63 4y agoThat kind of policy around textbook reuse doesn’t work well. Information is changing and teaching from 10 year old textbooks is the same situation public schools have (though, their challenges come from underfunding). For some fields, use open source resources would likely work better and embrace the living nature of that particular field. For others, I think setting price ceilings or allowing schools/governments to negotiate pricing (similar to the new Medicare drug negotiation) would work better in keeping the price of textbooks down.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoCalculus (and even calculus pedagogy) hasn't meaningfully changed in the past decade. You can still teach students the basics of chemistry or art history with an older book. Yes, some classes like genetics, epidemiology, and c++ teach content that's been completely reinvented in that time, but the majority of 100-200 level classes could easily use older books rather than requiring Pearson's latest edition.
- Ekaros 4y agoWhy not just make some publicly funded text books and mandate that they must be used in any publicly funded institution.