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High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

torrentfreak.com

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Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#171

Post by joe_the_user »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#172

Post by aledalgrande »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

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…

> 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.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#173

Post by zzless »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

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…

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'.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#174

Post by dh2022 »

hedora wrote: post #44
kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

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…

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 sc…

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.

[1] https://www.tateesq.com/learn/student-loan-bankruptcy-law-hi...

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#175

Post by Firmwarrior »

LanceH wrote: post #170
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 t…

It's complete bullshit

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?

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#176

Post by andersa »

Super confused by stories like this. I went to university in Germany and any course materials we needed were provided to us as pdfs. They also had a service where you could print it out on a bunch of copy paper if you wanted a bit more tangible form, for basically the cost of paper and toner. My entire tuition likely cost less than American students waste on books. Don't you want people to learn?

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#178

Post by psychomugs »

r9550684 wrote: post #156

I came to America poor, and went straight to a public university, on scholarship and no money to even pay for food (grad seminars and special events with free sandwiches and pizza is how I learned about things like quaternions as an undergrad). But as an eastern European hacker, i had a complete disregard of copyright, I also grew up in the 90s when hacker ethos included strong anti-authoritarian elements. No way I w…

That great guy sounds like a great guy. Wish I knew someone like them.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#179

Post by pjc50 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

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…

> 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".

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#180

Post by nbow »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

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…

Here's a weird idea, education should be free
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