51–60 of 322 posts
You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!
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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.
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 accountabilit…
I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them. Isn’t it interesting how little effort has been invested in mitigating the runaway cost of higher education? That we enabled college administrators to turn up the cost dial without speed bumps? No wonder why young people have become cynical…
We exploit 20 something year olds new found freedom and cashflows. This is the first time they are making money and are looking to be independent and "grown up" or "find themselves" so the market says "hey, I'll help you find yourself if you give me money."
Young people have a natural sense of invisibility. "I can do anything I set my mind to" has been burned into their brains since grade school. The market turns this into "I can buy anything I want to."
It's like society says "Look, you're grown up now so you need to participate in the economy. Not only do you need to make money, but what's more important is you need to spend money so I can have it."
Anybody actually keep and use their old textbooks?
Way back in the day, I only ever kept an algorithms book and used it once a never.
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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.
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.
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…
Having it as a reference? Sure. Requiring its purchase for a semester, as in, your grades will depend on it? No no
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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?
I did more or less. I said I’m the instructor of record I can decide how I take assignments. Next thing was “paperless” complaints. I was “using too much paper.” After a little back and forth they got tired of me, handed me a degree and told me to leave. I think what really irked them was other students found out and started demanding it from all the real professors and adjuncts and in other contexts. Then I was an a…
Maybe I'm weird, but this sounds like the highest form of compliment.