This news item may not mean much to you, but I've recently had the experience of trying to help a lady through college -- and as you know, on fortune's cap, I am not the very button.
Two bills in the California legislature target the rising prices of college textbooks. These books have become a huge part of the university racket. Many of them cost well over $100 -- and the publishers come out with new editions every year or two, because they do not want students to buy used copies. The changes between editions are rarely more than cosmetic.
Although one would expect (say) an art history text to contain many color reproductions, nothing justifies a $120 asking price for any soft-bound publication. The volumes covering most subjects -- American history, economics, law -- do not require elaborate production values. Yet within the world of college textbooks, even normal-sized paperbacks containing only text and a few black-and-white photos often carry price tags over $50.
The creation of a "new" edition every year is a recent and utterly disingenuous phenomenon. I took a careful look at my ladyfriend's French textbook, and I can assure you that the French language has not changed markedly since the 1970s, when I tried to learn it. Although one book is (theoretically) all the student needs as he progresses from a beginning language class to the advanced courses, the "new edition" scam forces the struggling student to shell out another C-note when he or she takes French 2.
But textbooks are the least of it. The college loan system is where the real racketeering takes hold.
(If you can't afford a book, here's a workaround: Bring a laptop and a small scanner into any library carrying the textbook you need. The job may take a few hours, but $0 < $100+. And perhaps bittorrent can take over from there...)
3 comments:
I just use the old edition of the text for most of my classes. Usually there are only a few cases that are different, and I can pull those from the internet. Except in Con Law, where Bush is basically re-writing things...the texts cannot keep up with his expansion of presidential power.
College became a racket when Nixon axed federal funding for higher ed, around the same time he pvtized the postal service along with balooning the postal rates on large-format magazines so mags like Ramparts and The Realist would disappear. Nixon understood that the defunding of higher ed would keep almost all faculty (the agitators with bonafides) where they already were, forever altering the way faculty had always migrated every few years.
In the early 1970s, many colleges and universities had begun to admit and matriculate ill-prepared students ( consequences of Affirmative Action plus high school grads were simply less than literate or numerate), which mandated a host of new 'developmental' courses for the millions of reluctant students then being admitted. That's another racket which adds at least a year to those students' college time -- it's a racket because every student has to take 'placement' tests before entering, and there are no 'national' 'norms' for placing students in remedial or credit courses.
Textbook publishers belong in hell. Most of what I know about that racket is dull blogwise-speaking, so I'll keep it to myself for now, except to say I used to tell the publisher's reps not to come to my office until they could certify that their texts had been proofread; also, every now and again the bookstore would get 100s of new texts with pages missing or half the pages upside down. Honest to god.
I told you it would be dull. If you've read this far, here's your reward. A developmental student asked me during the 3rd week of classes if I could explain to her when to use 'whose' and 'who's' because she kept getting them 'wrong' even though she thought she understood. (She was smart, and she in fact did understand such simple stuff.) So we chatted, and she showed me how she had followed along in her _Programmed Spelling Demons_ (4th or 5th edition). See, at the end of each chapter, the text had a test with the answers on the following page. The text's answers had "who's" where 'whose' belonged and "whose" where 'who's' belonged, and also reversed 'altar' and 'alter' (in another chapter). The f***ers didn't correct anything in the book since its first edition, which was cheap at $3.95, but had since cost 5x that much!
The other side of the racket: In the 1980s most colleges began offering degrees in the health-related fields (Allied Health, Nursing, Ultrasound, etc.), and the texts for those courses are expensive and continuously revised. Those texts are bargains at $200; the publishers subsidize them by over-charging for their other, usually pathetic, texts. Finally, book buyers buy current 'examination' texts from faculty and re-sell them to 'warehouse' book stores on the cheap, which helps students but hurts the publishers.
The student loan racket is the worst of it, as you've noted, and that racket took off in the 1970s, when everyone believed college was necessary.
Noted persons who didn't go to college: George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, and Harry Truman.
Thomson Wadsworth is one of the worst. I recently had to pay $60 for a 300 page paperback--"Theory Into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism", 2002. They even want $45 for a very DRM-hamstrung e-book version that's only useable for 365 days.
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