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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

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.

cde-v 3y ago
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.
- bequanna 3y ago
  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.)
  - Danjoe4 3y ago
    The solution is gov loans for higher ed needs to be contingent on a given school having administrative costs be less than 10% of their budget.
  - cde-v 3y ago
    So peacefully protest the University Executives and Administrators?
atomicnumber3 3y ago
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.
- watwut 3y ago
  Wouldn't it be fair use if the class just copied content for those two assignments? It is using only small portion of the whole thing after all.
  - sowbug 3y ago
    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.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      It's more likely they were lazy and conformed to the status quo. You know, the old never attribute to malice what is easily explained by ignorance.
      - rwnspace 3y ago
        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.
azernik 3y ago
More like a principal-agent problem than moral hazard, but that's just me being pedantic, you're absolutely right.
x0x0 3y ago
Bundled prices and and a lack of price visibility often promote extortionate pricing, bribes, etc. The value of the current arrangement is students can't ignore the prices. I'd bet a nice lunch that if books were part of tuition, the net dollars flowing to publishers would increase.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Why would schools send money to publishers that they can hoard for themselves?
  - x0x0 3y ago
    Because you only fight so hard to reduce costs that you can just pass through. Schools -- assuming willingness / ability to spend $ on education is fixed -- are already losing $ that could have gone to them to publishers.
vanilla_nut 3y ago
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.
- ncallaway 3y ago
  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)
  - esafak 3y ago
    And can pay with a low interest rate loan.
    - sterlind 3y ago
      for the next 15 years.
  - xur17 3y ago
    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.
anamexis 3y ago
That's exactly what we were doing at a previous employer. It was called "Equitable Access" https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-advantage/equitable-access https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-advantage/equitable-...
chongli 3y ago
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.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  A prof being greedy or thrifty or uncaring about textbook isn't strongly correlated to teaching ability.
- esafak 3y ago
  These expensive books are usually for mandatory, introductory classes. I don't know if the students have that much choice here.
- someweirdperson 3y ago
  > 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?
hedora 3y ago
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.
- aerostable_slug 3y ago
  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.
  - hedora 3y ago
    It used to work this way until recently, and none of the problems you describe were real issues. It’s difficult to argue impossibility in the face of an existence proof.
raverbashing 3y ago
Or, universities should forbid any teacher from requiring the purchase of any book Having it as a reference? Sure. Requiring its purchase for a semester, as in, your grades will depend on it? No no
- 6510 3y ago
  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.
robotburrito 3y ago
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?
wholinator2 3y ago
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.
gnicholas 3y ago
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.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  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...
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    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.
hayst4ck 3y ago
> 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?
newsclues 3y ago
> 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.
- jimhefferon 3y ago
  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
  - newsclues 3y ago
    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.
    - jimhefferon 3y ago
      I don't know if you are US, but at least here, I perceive it is against the current culture to do this. Love to be wrong, but I don't think so.
rg111 3y ago
> Bundle materials into tuition expenses. 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.
joe_the_user 3y ago
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.
aledalgrande 3y ago
> It incentivizes the right people 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.
zzless 3y ago
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'.
pjc50 3y ago
> Bundle materials into tuition expenses. 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".
nbow 3y ago
Here's a weird idea, education should be free
dietr1ch 3y ago
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.
_dain_ 3y ago
> 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.
g_p 3y ago
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.
Buttons840 3y ago
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. """ And so on. You can read the full story in the book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman or at https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html .
chiefalchemist 3y ago
> 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?
cwdegidio 3y ago
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.
- marpstar 3y ago
  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...
slt2021 3y ago
what ends up happening is Dean/Department head will publish textbook and will force entire university to purchase his textbook and earn $$$. this is whats happening at some elite/Ivy league universities
- Enginerrrd 3y ago
  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.
bufferoverflow 3y ago
> Bundle materials into tuition expenses. Professors: OK, my book is now $10,000.

cde-v 3y ago

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.

bequanna 3y ago
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.)
- Danjoe4 3y ago
  The solution is gov loans for higher ed needs to be contingent on a given school having administrative costs be less than 10% of their budget.
- cde-v 3y ago
  So peacefully protest the University Executives and Administrators?

atomicnumber3 3y ago

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.

watwut 3y ago
Wouldn't it be fair use if the class just copied content for those two assignments? It is using only small portion of the whole thing after all.
- sowbug 3y ago
  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.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    It's more likely they were lazy and conformed to the status quo. You know, the old never attribute to malice what is easily explained by ignorance.
    - rwnspace 3y ago
      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.

azernik 3y ago

More like a principal-agent problem than moral hazard, but that's just me being pedantic, you're absolutely right.

x0x0 3y ago

Bundled prices and and a lack of price visibility often promote extortionate pricing, bribes, etc. The value of the current arrangement is students can't ignore the prices. I'd bet a nice lunch that if books were part of tuition, the net dollars flowing to publishers would increase.

hgsgm 3y ago
Why would schools send money to publishers that they can hoard for themselves?
- x0x0 3y ago
  Because you only fight so hard to reduce costs that you can just pass through. Schools -- assuming willingness / ability to spend $ on education is fixed -- are already losing $ that could have gone to them to publishers.

vanilla_nut 3y ago

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.

ncallaway 3y ago
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)
- esafak 3y ago
  And can pay with a low interest rate loan.
  - sterlind 3y ago
    for the next 15 years.
- xur17 3y ago
  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.

anamexis 3y ago

That's exactly what we were doing at a previous employer. It was called "Equitable Access" https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-advantage/equitable-access https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-advantage/equitable-...

chongli 3y ago

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.

hgsgm 3y ago
A prof being greedy or thrifty or uncaring about textbook isn't strongly correlated to teaching ability.
esafak 3y ago
These expensive books are usually for mandatory, introductory classes. I don't know if the students have that much choice here.
someweirdperson 3y ago
> 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?

hedora 3y ago

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.

aerostable_slug 3y ago
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.
- hedora 3y ago
  It used to work this way until recently, and none of the problems you describe were real issues. It’s difficult to argue impossibility in the face of an existence proof.

raverbashing 3y ago

Or, universities should forbid any teacher from requiring the purchase of any book Having it as a reference? Sure. Requiring its purchase for a semester, as in, your grades will depend on it? No no

6510 3y ago
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.

robotburrito 3y ago

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?

wholinator2 3y ago

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.

gnicholas 3y ago

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.

karaterobot 3y ago
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...
- gnicholas 3y ago
  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.

hayst4ck 3y ago

> 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?

newsclues 3y ago

> 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.

jimhefferon 3y ago
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
- newsclues 3y ago
  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.
  - jimhefferon 3y ago
    I don't know if you are US, but at least here, I perceive it is against the current culture to do this. Love to be wrong, but I don't think so.

rg111 3y ago

> Bundle materials into tuition expenses. 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.

joe_the_user 3y ago

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.

aledalgrande 3y ago

> It incentivizes the right people 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.

zzless 3y ago

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'.

pjc50 3y ago

> Bundle materials into tuition expenses. 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".

nbow 3y ago

Here's a weird idea, education should be free

dietr1ch 3y ago

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.

_dain_ 3y ago

> 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.

g_p 3y ago

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.

Buttons840 3y ago

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. """ And so on. You can read the full story in the book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman or at https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html .

chiefalchemist 3y ago

> 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?

cwdegidio 3y ago

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.

marpstar 3y ago
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...

slt2021 3y ago

what ends up happening is Dean/Department head will publish textbook and will force entire university to purchase his textbook and earn $$$. this is whats happening at some elite/Ivy league universities

Enginerrrd 3y ago
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.

bufferoverflow 3y ago

> Bundle materials into tuition expenses. Professors: OK, my book is now $10,000.