161–170 of 322 posts
It’s so much worse than you think. Many textbooks come with license keys specifically so you can’t buy used books anymore. Students who do buy a used book are typically coerced into buying the license key to do digital homework, or whatever other reason. When I was teaching during a graduate fellowship I accepted paper assignments for students who bought used books, or who shared books with other students. The Pearso…
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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. Basically minimizing cost to extort more cash.
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).
Culprits are always the instructors/professors who teach courses. Aren't they happy with their salaries? How much royalty do these instructors get from selling $200 textbook to their students? These professors should be ashamed of themselves in involving this scammy behavior, while at the same time these unethical/immoral professors ask their students to sign honor code.
Nah, almost never. That is usually forced by the university, publishers and, surprisingly, by the students and their parents: Say the textbook used for the last 5 years costs $300 and now you want to switch to a different, cheaper book. Now you have to convince admin (why switch? The previous one works) and students (I pay $$$ tuition, why are you cheaping out on the book? Is it worse?). > how much royalty do they ge…
You might consider providing a more concrete example if you're going to throw shame around. This answer feels emotionally charged and incomplete.
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Why wouldn’t the dean tell them to go pound sand? Does Pearson do anything for the university except extracting money?
Publishers have a sales force that courts and encourages (bribes) academics and administrators. They fund conferences and provide jobs (writing textbooks). It's a patronage network that exploits young people.
And their parents. And the general taxpayer (via student loans).
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because that Dean is likely responsible for receiving payments - maybe not personally, but to the school - from that same business.
Or that business simply gives small preferred publishing deals to the Dean's professors. Often these professors have their own books that are required for the class (and nobody else uses these books). You end up with books that sell I graduated from a large state university engineering school 20 years ago and this was the case so I'm sure it's only become more "enshittified".
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 produc…
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 cr…
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.