While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators:
By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
> While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators:
Exploitative textbook pricing is also a problem that needs to be solved, and its unproductive to pass up lower-hanging fruit just to focus a higher one.
How much of this is because there's more personal risk involved in cutting a budget than spending too much? Like, who in their right mind would cut any sort of counseling? One suicide and you're in trouble, whether or not it makes sense. Diversity-promoting staff? You know the second you look at that budget sideways your school will be in the news for some asshole senior wearing blackface at a party, and your name will be in the resulting national stories as the guy who cut that budget. Better increase it just to be safe. Predatory lending hits the news again and your school's on a Bottom 10 list for financial counselors per capita that's published in USA Today? Yikes. And so on, and so on, for many far more mundane things. You cut anything and any performance or enrollment metric takes a hit (and gets press)? Or sports, and The Team does poorly the next season? Oh man. Hope you have a good severance package.
Way more personal pressure to increase budgets than decrease them at schools, I'd think. Cut something and anything sort-of related to it goes wrong whether or not the cuts caused it you will be in for a rough time. It's really easy to point at spending levels and increases when someone asks if you've "done anything" about some issue.
[EDIT] because this is the Internet I guess I should state explicitly that no, I'm not against psychological counseling for students or anti-diversity or anything like that, that's just the kind of thing that sometimes makes the news and if there's anyone we can justify blaming for any reason, we definitely will, so I picked those as examples.
College enrollment has been growing as our nation absurdly stigmatizes not going. Lecturing scales well and doesn't mandate growing tenured faculty, but poor technology leads schools to hire more paper pushers.
You're talking about a colleges' costs, whereas the original article is talking about students' costs.
You have the causality backwards.
An increase in # administrators isn't responsible for the increase in students' costs (primarily through tuition fees). An increase in administrators is enabled by an increase in tuition fees received by schools.
This is correct. People arguing otherwise are misunderstanding capitalism. Tuition doesn't go up because administrators need to be paid. Tuition goes up because the market will pay it. The administrators are the result of the profit margin of tuition, not the cause.
It's the same argument that sports tickets cost so much because the players get paid so much. That is backwards. Ticket price rises to the level that the audience will pay, and then that determines how much money is available to pay players.
Somehow I doubt this. You think publishers are just going to sit back and let this happen? Either publishers will lobby against this, or they will force exclusivity contracts with universities so that "open source" books are banned.
I don't think I quite understand - what would lobbying against the creation of open textbooks do exactly? What kind of law could be passed that could prevent that?
I guess they might have enough leverage with professor/universities to force exclusivity contracts, but I would like to hear about examples.
Perhaps publishers could target the accreditation boards for their bribery? A requirement that all university textbooks go through some ridiculous vetting/approval process so onerous and expensive that only the major publishers could possibly afford it might do the trick (and of course the associated costs could just be passed on to students).
One of the biggest reasons I am dismissive of the "free tuition" change in NYS for SUNY schools is the massive cost associated with college that isn't tuition. Ignoring room and board, tuition is still only ~50% of the cost of college. Fees can be massive (I was paying 2k+ a year in fees 10 years ago), text books are exorbitant, and that doesn't consider all the ancillary costs for lab supplies, etc.
If it's branded as "free college", then students will have the wrong impression when they're planning, and the politicians that deliver it can pat themselves on the back more than they deserve.
When I went to UCSD (a long time ago) the standard engineering calculus book was revised every other year, usually changing all the homework problems, destroying the used market for it. It was written by the chair of the department. In that way the professors and the book publishers had an interest in keeping the price of textbooks very high.
I had a professor in college that explicitly told us to get an old version of the textbook. It ended up costing ~$8 on Amazon instead of $80 for the newest version.
My physics class on the other hand had a book that was 'customized' for us (chapters were rearranged to prevent resale), and we had to purchase access to webassign.
The behaviour of US universities when it comes to text books is astonishing to me. When I studied physics in the UK in the mid seventies such behaviour would have caused massive student protests. Now there are courses in the UK that have no textbooks at all and are based entirely on laboratory work, lectures, and on line study.
In fact when I studied there was no real requirement to buy books at all. Of course most of us did spend a lot on books but it was nothing compared to the amounts I regularly see mentioned on line in discussions about US unis. It was simply convenient to use the recommended book so that lecturers could refer to chapters, formulas, and figures and so on and so that when you asked your fellow students for help that you would all be on the same page so to speak. In theory you could have got by with your own lecture notes and visits to the library.
I'm quite sure that my old copy of Lorrain and Corson would be just as good for EM part of a bachelor's in physics now as it was in 1975. In fact I think I'll dig it out and start to refresh my skills.
One problem is that some students cheat. They develop and pass around open-source sets of answers. If the problems don't change, then students don't learn as well.
> One problem is that some students cheat. They develop and pass around open-source sets of answers. If the problems don't change, then students don't learn as well.
The solution to that is to not revise the textbook, it's to pass out different homework handouts each semester.
IMHO, the textbook problems sets should be for student practice and all the solutions should be in the back of the book (vs. just the odds).
I believe that auto-generation of homework/assessment elements (or the maintenance of a large corpus of previously developed assessment elements that can be curated at will) should be ubiquitous in all subject areas. Mathematics is clearly the easiest and should be available now to everyone.
I suspect, however, that academic publishers would attempt to sue the pants off anyone that built such a service if it relied on user submissions of content (e.g. a professor uploads their homework assignments to the library of content and that content can be utilized by anyone else on the system).
A better solution is to reevaluate your evaluation scheme. If homework solutions become available then homework answers can't be trusted as a measure of understanding. You need exams, essays, and projects. Homework should be left as a tool to develop understanding and measure progress, but not for final grades.
That's true. However, in all the university classes with graded homework that I took, the homework only counted for a small fraction of the final grade (usually <=10%). I think it was only "graded" to give the less-motivated students a more straightforward incentive to do it, and encourage more consistent engagement with the course content.
Same for me, which is another reason, though, to not worry about cheating on homework. Cheating on tests, yes, but homework, with it counting 10-15%, only means the difference between one grade level, at most. And a failing student would only move to a C or D.
If you don't want students to cheat or share answers then you wouldn't be getting the questions from a published textbook, regardless of if it was open or proprietary.
How does a proprietary textbook solve the cheating problem? Even a new copy yearly doesn't do much of anything, students can still share answers or pay a third party to answer the questions on their behalf.
If you ask any professor, they'll tell you that homework can't stop cheaters, and it doesn't really matter if you change the problems every year. Exams are how you catch cheaters, especially if you have subtly different problems to catch copiers at the exam itself.
They're only hurting themselves.
If they happen to get a job, they won't last long. They'll be destined to float from company to company, changing jobs when they're found to be frauds. Or, they'll actually pick up enough knowledge to hide away at some larger company.
That sounds like a pain in the ass for their employers. An incompetent person with a college degree makes life more difficult for recruiters (directly), and for competent people looking for jobs (indirectly).
Interviewing a bunch of incompetent applicants to find the competent one is not cheap.
Every professor should have a procedural problem generator that takes a seed number input and creates an entire, unique assignment, with a grading guide generator that operates from the same seed to demonstrate the "correct" steps to reach the solutions for the assignment.
That is something you could literally write once and continue to use for 100 years, tweaking only when the course requirements change. Even if you're lazy, and write all the questions and solution guides by hand, you could still select from every such question that you had ever written, and by your 20th year on the job, memorizing from the bootleg study guides would be harder than just learning the course material.
Do not all colleges have some form of honor code? Where I attended (two schools), it seemed universally understood that the Honor Code had meaning — I may have had blinders on, but I never saw evidence of cheating.
I readily admit my school's (while highly selective) were not known as cutthroat, "keep up or get out" institutions, which I'm aware is a de facto state at some places. Sadly, such rank competitiveness fosters a "need" to cheat.
as a math professor once said to me just before he gave an exam to his students at a highly regarded, nationally-known, top-25 university: "they cheat like crazy."
Every prof I had in university trotted out this same issue. They all tried to take down answer sheets as soon as possible, got upset when people asked with help solve them past questions, etc.
Except one. This guy had been teaching for like 10 years, and put EVERY SINGLE PAST PAPER HE HAD out there. He provided students with a massive, massive stash of questions and answers.
For any given problem, you could either solve it, or you could just navigate thousands of PDFs trying to find the solution. And when you wanted to do some solo practice, you had endless options.
He reused questions from those papers in midterms, but the chances of you actually picking the right question from all the possibilities was very slim.
It's one of those situations where, paradoxically, by being completely gregarious, he achieved better results than by being ultra guarded and secretive.
The honor society at my college decided to solve the problem of students passing around answer sets. They created an answer database (with support of the dean) to ensure that answers were not unfairly shared. It worked great. Students got a lot more practice material. Some teachers hated it since they had to change tests, but even if they refused, at least the system is fair (thus no more unfair advantages from "cheating").
I stopped grading homework in mid-level math classes except for completion. If students turn in something, they get credit, and I grade two or three problems, of their choosing, carefully to give them feedback on their proof writing. I still have students hand in work straight from the solutions manual.
The solution to cheating is to reinstitute the viva voce and make passing it a major part of the score required to get a degree.
I'm quite confident that no one at Exeter Uni. in 1977 could have cheated their way to an honours degree in physics because defending your final year experimental report (120 typed pages of data, charts, conclusions, explanations, and procedures) required answering live questions from two very smart faculty members.
We had an economics professor that had a $110 textbook with tear-out homework assignments that needed to be completed in pen.
He said that he did so in order to make sure the publishing company would keep printing them, intentionally and openly ensuring there wouldn't be a used book market. His justification is in the syllabus here https://economics.byu.edu/Documents/Syllabi%20-%20broken/201....
Looking back, and having printed a book, I'm 99% sure that's BS. Or, at best, you could print the book much cheaper yourself.
A history course I took, the profs did the same (pair of them at the school that wrote the textbook together). Tear out assignments, I photocopied and submitted that (not marked down). But they frequently updated it so even though I took care of my book, I couldn't resell it for much anyways. The textbooks were still around $80 or so, so this did nothing to keep prices down.
Oh the horror! I was worth on average about $200 at the time so I guess they could've taken my lunch and rent money. I photocopied it from my own textbook and used it myself, I suspect that would've helped my case.
> (The used book market actually drives up the price of texts – to see why, think of what would happen to car prices if used car sales were not permitted.)
My best guess is he is trying to argue that if you disallowed used car sales, you'd get better economies of scale on new cars, as more would need to be produced to fill the void left my used car sales. While it might drive the price of a new car/textbook down, I still think it would drive the average amount paid by drivers/students up, which is what we really care about (as students, at least; obviously the textbook companies would love to sell more books).
In fact, this seems to a case of the broken window fallacy[1] — a textbook case, one might say. ;-) (In that, if you essentially destroy the used text book's value by not using them, that this is somehow beneficial.)
That's bad news, because not only is he a crook, he is an ivory tower economist who is going by gut feel (i.e. useless opinion). In the real world, prices are not just set by cost - actually most of the time it is set by what the consumer can pay. Cost is just a lower bound, but that's still bad news for the professor since car companies already enjoy plenty of economy of scale. Similarly, publishers a captive market like student textbooks are not going to lower prices. Printing is not the cost - it's not novels sitting on a bookshelf with no idea whether it will get picked up or not.
I think the point the professor was trying to make was that the increased supply of used books incentivizes the publishing company to print a new edition, which all of the students will be forced to pay for. This is analogous to how car companies update their models on a yearly basis.
When an economy's health is largely measured by movement of money, this does in fact help. If that were the only or best metric. In a consumption-oriented economy it may be considered that.
Creating things that last years, decades, generations, doesn't keep the economy "moving" in this sense. It can cause some sectors to fail (a sort of boom-bust). If you create a near perfect product that lasts decades, you have an immediate need to ramp up production (to meet demand). Once the demand tapers off due to market penetration, growth slows, and then you shrink--potentially rapidly. If the product doesn't expire frequently (break, wear out, get lost, something) and is a non-consumable good, then your production needs to drop off or you need to make different things.
I worked for an employer once that was in that situation. I saw it coming, but they straight up lied to the staff about what was coming up, how the future was great. Then we went from $500 million/year in revenue to $150 million/year because our massive ramp-up for production succeeded, now our product was in every system it needed to be in. New systems are made relatively slowly (big things, like airliners, but also smaller like military ground vehicles), and only needed our parts for maintenance (breakdown after ~10 years; maybe not break but need replacement/servicing) and the less frequent new production.
By some metrics, this was a failure of the company (in fact, the division was sold off some time later). But it actually succeeded, it needed to pivot to maintenance and divert other resources to engineering other solutions (or let them go, which is what happened to many of them). They actually have pivoted, I'm told, at least some parts of it. They're doing more diverse sets of safety critical systems, including getting into the consumer ground vehicle market now. That need to pivot should have been obvious, but for some reason it wasn't to many of my peers, and the management ignored it (willfully) at least in their presentations to us.
A consideration that seems to be constantly missing in such evaluations is that of waste. It's externalized, and I wish there was a way to force those costs back on producers. Creating short-lived products just to keep growth going is simply evil.
I think he is implying (correctly) that in the absense of a robust secondary market for cars, the prices for new cars would drop -- there would be less demand for new cars people knew they couldn't resell. It's a bad analogy, though, especially for an economics professor. By suppressing the secondary market for his book, he secures his monopoly on a mandated good, ensuring the higher price.
I've noticed that Economics professors seem to often do stuff like this.
I had to take an economics statistics course my senior year due to some confusion over the then-newish AP Statistics exam -- I received credit, but couldn't apply it to my computer science major. The class was ridiculous, it was basically statistics 101/102, but used the first few chapters of the professor's Econometrics textbook, which sold for $150 circa 1998.
He handed out the assignments at the beginning of the semester, and you didn't need to show up except for the tests. The test used textbook questions, and asked questions that referenced passages in his stupid book, including charts in chapters that weren't covered as part of the actual class.
> (The reason is that they simply do not go into sufficient depth for you to learn much about the application
of economics; and, of course, they suggest that you are searching for articles rather than reading the good financial press on a daily basis.)
So Internet articles are unacceptable because "they suggest that [you are not] reading the good financial press on a daily basis" ? Is that one of the stated goals of the course -- to force you into a daily habit of reading the print version of the Wall Street Journal?
That's why I chose not to attend a religious university (run by the most profitable religion cartel in the USA) in order to obtain a scientific education.
Classic. When I was at UCSD (also a long time ago), I had the privilege of taking a course from a professor who used his own $70 textbook, then "taught" by reading it in front of a whiteboard. Undergrad tuition was also going up 20-30% per year at the time, for something that could only charitably be called "education."
There's very little excuse to create new versions of a calculus textbook. My decades-old Thomas still works just fine.
When I took econ 101 at the University of Washington there were five professors that each had their own textbook (and maybe a sixth but I never confirmed it).
Why don't people just scan or photocopy a textbook, if the price is too high? Do American students give even higher value for their time than the cost of a textbook?
While I appreciate the token nod towards controlling costs, and the text book scam is a mark of shame that the professoriate class should be deeply embarrassed by, this is a bit like tending to the deep cut on your hand while your severed leg spurts blood in cadence with your fading heartbeat.
Exactly this. College books is a scam but the $500 you pay a semester isn't the reason college costs $50K per year. This seems a PR move to say they are trying something but like most things.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
You're right, in the scheme of things it doesn't bring down a college education cost that much. But it's one of the relatively simpler ways of reducing the overall cost.
My college just started pushing this as well, but missed an important point: some professors already use Creative Commons textbooks. I'm currently using one in my proofwriting class - and my professor demanded we have a print copy. I've only taken one computer science course that required a non-free book, and that was because the professor was the author.
What free texts are used instead of, say, Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, et al or Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation? There are some really good non-free texts, I'm genuinely curious what the free alternatives are and how they compare.
"Algorithms with Sanjoy Dasgupta (Christos Papadimitriou) and Umesh Vazirani, McGraw-Hill 2006. Note: until recently, we had here the pdf of an early version of this book, for the convenience of the students. Unfortunately, our publisher demanded that we delete it. Advice to authors: (a) make sure you keep the copyright, and (b) do not publish with McGraw Hill."
I think you should elaborate a bit since it might not be clear to US readers.
College professors (collaboratively) write teaching materials that are copied and bound by the print shop of your school. Nowadays they're typically freely available in PDF, to registered students at least.
Nothing like American textbooks sold over $100 by big publishing companies.
I would argue that beyond that traditional college bound paths should transition to more of a vo-tech (which is a bad term in academia) path. Look at CS curriculum or anyone learning anything with a semblance of Security. Most of the talent there is lacking hands on experience, instead students spend 4 years learning a text book methodology only to find out that in the real world the text book method isn't always possible or right.
I'm seeing more and more of my peers care less about a degree and more about quantifiable experience. I'd rather have a mid talent coder that's flexible and understand the larger problem set we're solving than someone highly skilled in algorithmic design (which is something i've seen).
In the area I was from, VoTech was so looked down upon that I never even considered going to one of those schools. I can't help but think that attitude stops a lot of people from considering them, even if they're perfectly adequate for the career they want.
> you would also reduce learning by an equivalent amount...
Can you justify this claim? It's easy to observe that current students who take the same classes differ in the amount of learning they do.
I see no reason to believe that different students taking the same class schedule consisting of 0 classes would suddenly all learn the same amount. It seems more likely that they would continue to differ in the amount of learning they do.
When I was at Oregon State (a couple years ago), all my math and econ classes used "My{Math,Econ}Lab" as homework. Meaning, if you chose not to or could not pay for Pearson's infamous Flash-based "web" app (which I had to spin up a Windows VM to run), you could not pass the class.
It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.
At San Jose State we used "Mastering Physics" which we could only purchase a licence to by buying a new unopened textbook. It was an infuriating piece of software that would mark your answers completely wrong unless they were EXACTLY right.
I just graduated from a very large university and the number of professors assigning homework this way was alarming. With prerecorded video lectures, assigning homework like this, and using questions from test banks for tests, professors are getting paid to do next to nothing.
The full professors at many large universities have to split their time between research and teaching. Both of which can be full-time jobs on their own. The consequence is that many great researchers are mediocre teachers (or only good for teaching smaller courses in their specialty), and many great teachers abandon the time needed for research (or aren't good researchers) which doesn't bring money and prestige to the school. So they get booted.
You're left with underpaid adjuncts, under qualified TAs, and research professors that don't want to teach another-goddamned-section of Calculus 1 (as one of my profs referred to it).
Not to mention that "research" can be further split into myriad activities that take up substantial amounts of time. Personally, I'd contend that writing grants and writing scientific code could also constitute full-time jobs (this might explain why a lot of scientific code is spaghetti; most researchers have to balance coding with publishing- and coding loses in this battle). Regardless of how many full-time jobs the modern researcher is expected to perform, the end result is the same: lower quality science furnished by 80 hour weeks and emotionally wrecked postdocs.
this is the kind of crap that administrators (as a class in society) force on faculty and then use it as justification for "our role is necessary" and "see, they couldn't be that busy".
I think the reason scientific code is spaghetti has more to do with different incentives than time management. you don't need scalable production quality code. you need a minimal working example of something even its a kluge. correct and ugly and novel will win over optimized and pretty and commented and non-novel...
I don't know whether or not the incentives or the time management contribute more towards the messiness, but I will nitpick one implicit assumption you're making here, which is that scientific code is "correct". There has been at least one well-publicized incident where scientific code is both messy and very much incorrect. I also think that, while optimization isn't necessarily something that researchers should focus on, pretty code / documentation / comments / systematic testing are elements that researchers really need to emphasize, because these practices ensure that the likelihood that their simulations / analysis pipelines aren't spewing out nonsense is substantially decreased. Furthermore, these practices would make code reviews a lot easier- it's much harder to make sense of your code when every other variable is named "i", "j" or "k" and this seems to be a common practice in some fields at least.
You know that is a very good point actually. I have talked with some bioinformaticians who have trouble reproducing others work because the dataset was unavailable or the code was not provided.
Personally, all the academic code I've used has been written by EE people or Applied Math people and had nice enough style/documentation/accessibility for me to have minimal issues.
The full professors are there to do research. I can understand the motivation for having professors teach advanced subjects, but having them teach intro classes is just silly. It's worse for both the students and the professor. Teaching and research are completely different skill sets after all.
Contracts vary. In both universities I attended (one mediocre, one in the top 5), in most departments, professor salaries were purely for education (9 month salary - get paid extra if they teach in summer), even though all the expectations for tenure, etc are research.
They are expected to do research, but the funds for that come from grants, not from their salaries.
So the contract was: Their salary was a 9 month salary, and they get to pay themselves the extra 3 months by getting grants for research. This is why many professors will say they can supplement their income by "up to a third" of their salary via grants. Which, BTW, also means that when you look up a public university professor's income (usually accessible to the public), you are seeing their 9 month income, and if they are active researchers, they get paid more.
So no, the university typically does not pay them to do the research. They pay themselves via grants. The university pays them for education, even though they always act as if they don't.
>I can understand the motivation for having professors teach advanced subjects, but having them teach intro classes is just silly. It's worse for both the students and the professor. Teaching and research are completely different skill sets after all.
All fine and well as long as the university does not try to attract students for undergrad by highlighting the great research they do, and indirectly imply that they will get an education from the best in the field. If their prospectus merely said "Come join us. You'll get a great education taught by adjuncts and outsourced to other companies", then your point would have more merit.
> professors are getting paid to do next to nothing
Speaking from the part-time professors perspective: occurring in parallel to this is a steady growth in course section sizes. 30 students used to be the norm for some courses, but 80-90 is the new normal just a few years later. Some of these tools are designed to help manage this. But the actual process of planning and delivering a lecture, providing individual feedback on written assignments (like exams), etc. is suffering.
Teaching effectively to a large section is harder than you might think, especially when teaching is only a fraction of your job & you have no TAs. But half-assing it is actually not too hard I guess. And you are seldom rewarded for the former. Thankfully for me and for my students, it is mostly a side hobby for me and not a living.
Which is really the deans and provost growing a power base that is dependent on them. They do not want to be dependant on a large group of influential professors. Better to foster a workforce of neutered adjuncts overseen by administrators who are not technically competent, and so design administrative regimes that avoid addressing issues of technical competence at all. The IRB is a prime example of this: people with a high school education provide administrative oversight of researchers working at the outer limits of human knowledge. It's insanity.
Engineering here had 200+ student enrolled on each class years ago, all managed by early 199x tools. It's doable and still delivered on education quality.
Likely that was the mistake. I've been to both a small and a large university. If you care about education, go to the small one. Much more likely the professors will put in a lot of effort to teach properly. Fewer students per class also motivates them.
The truly savvy professors don't even take the token bribes / hand outs from the publishers. They'll have their own "custom text book" for a class and charge students $X for xeroxed copy of the it. The savviest rotate the problems from semester to semester to ensure zero resale value.
My Economics professor famously used to release a new version of his textbook every year at my school. I suppose recognizing the forces at hand, he was making the most rational decision in doing so.
My Biology professor wrote the textbook he used in his class. And on the first day of class he gave each student who had purchased a new copy a cash refund on his author's royalty.
Mine did that as well. He also offered unlimited extra credit at the rate of 5pts per error found.
A small group of us got together that first evening and found enough typos, spelling and punctuation errors that we all passed the class with a high "A" without needing to do anything else.
He wasn't happy about it, and I think he later dropped the "unlimited" part. He was less upset when most of us went to class anyway -- The way I saw it, I paid for the class, even if I didn't have to worry about doing the work for a grade, I still wanted to learn something.
On the flip side, I had a professor who intentionally assigned older versions of textbooks since they were more affordable and the material had not really changed between editions.
Another economics professor produced her own reader/workbook which was provided for the cost of photocopying and binding.
The professors friendliest to student budgets even separated their custom materials into "lecture notes" which contained only instructional material and "exercises" which were generally made up of problems that actually appeared on previous exams, including space to write in. Total cost for this style of "textbook" per course was less than $20, purchased new from the university bookstore. Or you could inherit an older copy of the notes for free and just get a new copy of the exercise portion.
That kind of thing would be a free download today. Can you imagine paying thousands of dollars in tuition for a course, and then getting the entire textbook for free?
Those who do it are truly saints among scoundrels.
>The savviest rotate the problems from semester to semester to ensure zero resale value.
Not trying to tell you that there aren't some jackasses who do this for extra loot, but one good reason to rotate the problems is to prevent students from showing up with an answer key. ie: When I was in college our IEEE club had a more comprehensive question bank than any single prof at my uni.
Any college worth attending doesn't make homework a condition of your grades. If your class can be beaten by an "answer key" you aren't teaching/testing anything important.
I was in a class where the required book was written by the professor. However, fortunately, the book was really fantastic and better than any other book I have seen. Plus it was like $15.
I think he wrote the book so that students didn't have to spend money on a huge textbook containing information they don't need. This book had everything you needed for the class and not much more.
I'm not sure if my professor was being nice or not as savvy as you describe because the course was taught with a printed out book by him and another professor but all he charged for the entire book (plus homework problems) was 40 bucks USD. This was back in 2006 so I don't know what he's charging now (assuming he's not retired by now). By comparison, the average new book at the university book store was around 80 USD (at the lowest).
I don't think Pearson has such materials for upper level courses. They could probably figure out a way to be contractors for the courses no on wants to teach though, if they can find a way to work for less than lecturers do.
> It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.
Isn't a publisher a third-party for-profit company? If you need to buy a book for a class to read and do homework in order to pass the class, that's okay right? So, why is it wrong to expect someone to do the same thing digitally?
Books can be shared in study groups, lent between students, checked out from a campus library, bought and sold between terms, and photocopied. Much the same could be done for a DRM-free PDF.
The only way to complete MyMathLab homework is to pay out for a poorly-written Flash app.
Oregon State '05, they were charging $60 for the Kinko's packets for my various math and engineering classes. The best was the $150 I had to pay for a 'pre-print' loosely bound CS 'textbook' that one of my professors co-authored. Thank goodness it was only a 200 level class and I was already well beyond it. It was a terrible book and a rough class.
I taught a calculus class the the department had mandated
be managed with MyMathLab. There is a kernel of a good idea in these subject-specific course content management systems, key among them is they give a reasonable way to actually manage homework for large course sections. I tended to grade HW very lightly, I just want them to have their head in the space a small bit every few days, and MML was a way to make that manageable for a section of 70+ students without losing my mind.
But the execution is so half-assed that it not only turns off students from the platform, but it runs the risk of turning them off to the actual subject matter as well. The whole thing had the stench of static requirements doc to a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor development pipeline with little to no end-user (that is, students, not department administrators) feedback in the development cycle.
It's a bit like self-driving cars in a way. The execution is everything, and the half-way hybridized situation is the most dangerous for the end-user. And the missed execution to me smells a bit like an arms race between Pearson, Wiley, etc. to get their platforms out and entrenched with individual departments before each other.
Yay capitalism. Everything is a product or service, everything should have a profit motive, there is no such thing as a right to education, health care, justice, you only get what you can pay for, or are entitled to by the superiority of your family name and blood line. The state has no business here.
That is exactly what this is. Old fashioned conservatism.
My best math class was with a professor who did not use a textbook at all. He created ~5-10 problem long homework using a pdf we could easily get from his page on the school's website.
The focus universities have on homework is absurd. If you want to practice 100+ math problems, you can invent them yourself, or even find plenty on the internet. It only takes one or two problems to show that the student understands the subject matter. Any more required homework is a waste of everyone's resources.
Mandatory textbooks that happened to be authored by the professor or department head also had a variant - the collaboration work of different authors writing on some topic together.
At my university there were campuses hundreds of miles away from each other so I imagine the department also had to pay for the travel and other arrangements needed to get these collaborative textbooks written.
One of these textbooks that I had to buy for the usual massive price was one of the collaborative efforts. However, for the purposes of the degree at the campus I was on, only needed the bits written by our head of department were needed for the syllabus, the rest of it was out of scope.
To use a software analogy it was like buying the student version of MS Office when you only needed Word and not the other bits of the bundle. That would mean carrying 43 discs around instead of just the 7 discs around. So you see the problem of carrying a huge textbook up and down a hill every day.
I never understood why the lecturers did not produce, update and polish proper course materials that did not require outside materials except for pure reference. They had expectations on us to do homework but I wasn't seeing the results of theirs.
Had that same bullshit last year, in a graduate level Econ class for running market simulations. The professor readily acknowledged this was insane, but the response was basically "this is the way it's been, we always have to buy from this vendor."
seems like the best way to get college education at a cheaper cost is sending kids to other countries for education. I am saying this as a non-american resident of the US. You could use the extra money as a seed for the child's potential business ideas, if any.
I often wish there existed a 'student course materials bill of rights'. At a minimum, it would require professors to indicate which version(s) of the texts are acceptable, and would require them to provide this information ~2 weeks before the start of the term, allowing students time to order used books online.
The current-1 edition of a textbook, purchased used on Amazon, is often 25-50% of the cost of the new textbook in the college bookstore...
Of course, open-source textbooks would be even better.
This is wonderful! Though I can't believe that Openstax wasn't mentioned. For those interested in some excellent free & open source textbooks, look up Openstax.org. I sometimes read through chapters for the heck of it. My only wish is that they are made available for Kindle. Really makes me sad to look back at my college education and think of all the money I spent on textbooks of comparable quality.
OpenStax is a really cool project, I agree. (https://openstax.org/) It's organized by Rice University, with support from big name foundations like Gates and Hewlitt. The textbooks are free online, or campus bookstores can order print copies more or less at cost (as I recall). I've done some peer review work for chapters of their recently released University Physics book.
My main complaint is that their books are (intentionally) completely traditional in content and format: they're designed to be maximally easy for a "standard" existing course to switch to (since professors are often reluctant to throw out years of work in polishing their lectures). That means in particular that if you want a more modern textbook redesigned from the ground up based on (e.g.) physics education research, you're still stuck asking your students to pay big bucks for it.
Also, one negative observation I've seen as a chapter reviewer, at least for this particular text: by their very nature, these textbooks aren't the result of one passionate author with a cohesive vision and voice. They're written chapter by chapter by a variety of authors under a central project management team. So while the content winds up being solid (I hope), the text itself isn't really much fun to read. (Not that most textbooks do especially well in that department! But there are some good ones that do, and that can pay off for the class.)
Tom Moore's Six Ideas That Shaped Physics is one of my favorites. It upends the traditional order of topics in an intro physics class: it starts with conservation laws rather than F=ma, both because they're more fundamental (you're not going to use F=ma in quantum mechanics, but you'll sure use energy) and because students taking calculus concurrently will have learned about derivatives there by the time you get to acceleration and really need to start understanding them. Lots of other pedagogically novel features, too.
Another favorite of mine that might be especially interesting to the HN crowd is Chabay and Sherwood's Matter and Interactions text. One key feature is its tight integration of simulations using "VPython", which students start to use within the first few weeks of class. That makes it viable to have students study realistic forces rather than just the simplest cases. (E.g. adding air resistance to projectile motion is just one more line of code, rather than requiring a course in differential equations.) That also makes it more reasonable for their book to give true equations from the start (like the equation for relativistic momentum rather than just p=mv) and then state the more familiar forms as approximations.
Randall Knight's Physics for Scientists and Engineers is a much more standard text than those two, but it's still worlds better than most traditional texts that I've used: it changes the old standards in smaller ways, but still incorporating lots of research-based improvements. (Knight's little book /Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching/ was a great introduction to Physics Education Research for me when I first started teaching, too.)
Eric Mazur, one of the real leaders of the Physics Education Research community, wrote a book not long ago called /Principles and Practice of Physics/. I haven't had a chance to really go through it in detail yet to get a feel for everything that makes it unique (one big structural change from tradition is that he focuses on students getting rock solid on 1D physics before introducing the complications of vectors), but he's such an expert in this stuff that I wouldn't want to leave his book off of the list. (It's organized in a bit of a weird way, mind you.)
I'm sure there are others that I haven't thought to list. Debora Katz has a new book that I just heard about that emphasizes case studies, for example. But yeah: almost any of these books are fundamentally different than the classics in some way, and worlds better in my opinion.
I also know of at least a dozen absolutely amazing free textbooks published by the authors, sometimes even with .tex sources available on github.
Perhaps it's not a question of availability but of discoverability? Also, it would be nice if teachers could mix content from different sources of OER in order to create custom books.
My daughter starts in the fall and during recent campus tours the advice on the down low from the tour guide has been to get ebooks on-line and Never Buy From The Campus Store.
They also mention Amazon's text book rental (but I haven't done any price comparisons on that).
imo, Pearson is really evil, I live in Taiwan and still lots of classes in the top universities use Pearson textbooks, and lots of students pay for their solutions on Chegg, which makes it all more absurd.
1) We continue to need new textbooks: Despite relative little change in core materials for subjects like Calculus, there is a need for adaptation of texts to include current applications and methods.
2) The best use of interactive media to complement and enhance learning is yet to be determined.
3) The worst crime of textbook companies is lack of innovation.
I find it laughable that people think that $1500 a year (ballpark) is 'cutting costs' when annual tuition is on the order of $50,000. That is an order of magnitude of difference. Maybe students care about it because it is the only cost they really feel, but come on, these efforts are marginal at best. I thinking open textbooks are an incredibly important initiative, but they don't make a meaningful dent in college costs.
I'm teaching a data structures class w/java this coming fall semester, and am putting together a reference text/notes in markdown to provide for free, since it seems really silly to require a paid text for this stuff.
Every single item that contributes to the learning objectives of this course is incredibly Google-able, but as new students to the field, they do need at least some curation and direction to keep from getting overwhelmed. They need a reference resource that they can trust which is academic enough to be true, yet reasonably conversational. Textbooks used to fill this role, but publishers priced and walled-gardened themselves out of relevance.
Side note: if you're an professor who has done something like this in the past, I'd love to compare notes with you.
I'm basing my course this quarter on one from Northeastern, where Ben Lerner has written a pretty impressive set of notes, the latter half of which are data structures content:
The NEU course assumes that students have taken How to Design Programs in Racket, so the early notes refer to Racket syntax. I'm working on notes for a Racket-less introduction that uses the same tools for my course right now:
These notes also rely on a particularly good testing library that is capable of doing things like comparing objects for structural equality without requiring that students define a .equals() method first, which can be incredibly helpful for getting off the ground.
181 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadBy contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...
Exploitative textbook pricing is also a problem that needs to be solved, and its unproductive to pass up lower-hanging fruit just to focus a higher one.
Way more personal pressure to increase budgets than decrease them at schools, I'd think. Cut something and anything sort-of related to it goes wrong whether or not the cuts caused it you will be in for a rough time. It's really easy to point at spending levels and increases when someone asks if you've "done anything" about some issue.
[EDIT] because this is the Internet I guess I should state explicitly that no, I'm not against psychological counseling for students or anti-diversity or anything like that, that's just the kind of thing that sometimes makes the news and if there's anyone we can justify blaming for any reason, we definitely will, so I picked those as examples.
You have the causality backwards.
An increase in # administrators isn't responsible for the increase in students' costs (primarily through tuition fees). An increase in administrators is enabled by an increase in tuition fees received by schools.
It's the same argument that sports tickets cost so much because the players get paid so much. That is backwards. Ticket price rises to the level that the audience will pay, and then that determines how much money is available to pay players.
I guess they might have enough leverage with professor/universities to force exclusivity contracts, but I would like to hear about examples.
My physics class on the other hand had a book that was 'customized' for us (chapters were rearranged to prevent resale), and we had to purchase access to webassign.
In fact when I studied there was no real requirement to buy books at all. Of course most of us did spend a lot on books but it was nothing compared to the amounts I regularly see mentioned on line in discussions about US unis. It was simply convenient to use the recommended book so that lecturers could refer to chapters, formulas, and figures and so on and so that when you asked your fellow students for help that you would all be on the same page so to speak. In theory you could have got by with your own lecture notes and visits to the library.
I'm quite sure that my old copy of Lorrain and Corson would be just as good for EM part of a bachelor's in physics now as it was in 1975. In fact I think I'll dig it out and start to refresh my skills.
The solution to that is to not revise the textbook, it's to pass out different homework handouts each semester.
IMHO, the textbook problems sets should be for student practice and all the solutions should be in the back of the book (vs. just the odds).
That sounds like work, we are talking about academia here.
I suspect, however, that academic publishers would attempt to sue the pants off anyone that built such a service if it relied on user submissions of content (e.g. a professor uploads their homework assignments to the library of content and that content can be utilized by anyone else on the system).
Better look into old Russian textbooks for interesting (often very hard) calculus problems.
How does a proprietary textbook solve the cheating problem? Even a new copy yearly doesn't do much of anything, students can still share answers or pay a third party to answer the questions on their behalf.
They're only hurting themselves. If they happen to get a job, they won't last long. They'll be destined to float from company to company, changing jobs when they're found to be frauds. Or, they'll actually pick up enough knowledge to hide away at some larger company.
Interviewing a bunch of incompetent applicants to find the competent one is not cheap.
That is something you could literally write once and continue to use for 100 years, tweaking only when the course requirements change. Even if you're lazy, and write all the questions and solution guides by hand, you could still select from every such question that you had ever written, and by your 20th year on the job, memorizing from the bootleg study guides would be harder than just learning the course material.
Do not all colleges have some form of honor code? Where I attended (two schools), it seemed universally understood that the Honor Code had meaning — I may have had blinders on, but I never saw evidence of cheating.
I readily admit my school's (while highly selective) were not known as cutthroat, "keep up or get out" institutions, which I'm aware is a de facto state at some places. Sadly, such rank competitiveness fosters a "need" to cheat.
Except one. This guy had been teaching for like 10 years, and put EVERY SINGLE PAST PAPER HE HAD out there. He provided students with a massive, massive stash of questions and answers.
For any given problem, you could either solve it, or you could just navigate thousands of PDFs trying to find the solution. And when you wanted to do some solo practice, you had endless options.
He reused questions from those papers in midterms, but the chances of you actually picking the right question from all the possibilities was very slim.
It's one of those situations where, paradoxically, by being completely gregarious, he achieved better results than by being ultra guarded and secretive.
Do you mean that students who choose to cheat don't learn as well? (That doesn't garner much sympathy from me.)
I'm quite confident that no one at Exeter Uni. in 1977 could have cheated their way to an honours degree in physics because defending your final year experimental report (120 typed pages of data, charts, conclusions, explanations, and procedures) required answering live questions from two very smart faculty members.
He said that he did so in order to make sure the publishing company would keep printing them, intentionally and openly ensuring there wouldn't be a used book market. His justification is in the syllabus here https://economics.byu.edu/Documents/Syllabi%20-%20broken/201....
Looking back, and having printed a book, I'm 99% sure that's BS. Or, at best, you could print the book much cheaper yourself.
Didn't you read the PDF!?
> Photocopying of Assignments from someone else’s text is a violation of copyright laws, so please purchase your own text.
You could have been sued!
My best guess is he is trying to argue that if you disallowed used car sales, you'd get better economies of scale on new cars, as more would need to be produced to fill the void left my used car sales. While it might drive the price of a new car/textbook down, I still think it would drive the average amount paid by drivers/students up, which is what we really care about (as students, at least; obviously the textbook companies would love to sell more books).
In fact, this seems to a case of the broken window fallacy[1] — a textbook case, one might say. ;-) (In that, if you essentially destroy the used text book's value by not using them, that this is somehow beneficial.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
tl;dr The guy is both a tool and an idiot.
Creating things that last years, decades, generations, doesn't keep the economy "moving" in this sense. It can cause some sectors to fail (a sort of boom-bust). If you create a near perfect product that lasts decades, you have an immediate need to ramp up production (to meet demand). Once the demand tapers off due to market penetration, growth slows, and then you shrink--potentially rapidly. If the product doesn't expire frequently (break, wear out, get lost, something) and is a non-consumable good, then your production needs to drop off or you need to make different things.
I worked for an employer once that was in that situation. I saw it coming, but they straight up lied to the staff about what was coming up, how the future was great. Then we went from $500 million/year in revenue to $150 million/year because our massive ramp-up for production succeeded, now our product was in every system it needed to be in. New systems are made relatively slowly (big things, like airliners, but also smaller like military ground vehicles), and only needed our parts for maintenance (breakdown after ~10 years; maybe not break but need replacement/servicing) and the less frequent new production.
By some metrics, this was a failure of the company (in fact, the division was sold off some time later). But it actually succeeded, it needed to pivot to maintenance and divert other resources to engineering other solutions (or let them go, which is what happened to many of them). They actually have pivoted, I'm told, at least some parts of it. They're doing more diverse sets of safety critical systems, including getting into the consumer ground vehicle market now. That need to pivot should have been obvious, but for some reason it wasn't to many of my peers, and the management ignored it (willfully) at least in their presentations to us.
I had to take an economics statistics course my senior year due to some confusion over the then-newish AP Statistics exam -- I received credit, but couldn't apply it to my computer science major. The class was ridiculous, it was basically statistics 101/102, but used the first few chapters of the professor's Econometrics textbook, which sold for $150 circa 1998.
He handed out the assignments at the beginning of the semester, and you didn't need to show up except for the tests. The test used textbook questions, and asked questions that referenced passages in his stupid book, including charts in chapters that weren't covered as part of the actual class.
So Internet articles are unacceptable because "they suggest that [you are not] reading the good financial press on a daily basis" ? Is that one of the stated goals of the course -- to force you into a daily habit of reading the print version of the Wall Street Journal?
> Photocopying of Assignments from someone else’s text is a violation of copyright laws, so please purchase your own text.
Apparently he has never heard of Fair Use.
There's very little excuse to create new versions of a calculus textbook. My decades-old Thomas still works just fine.
Why don't people just scan or photocopy a textbook, if the price is too high? Do American students give even higher value for their time than the cost of a textbook?
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
"Algorithms with Sanjoy Dasgupta (Christos Papadimitriou) and Umesh Vazirani, McGraw-Hill 2006. Note: until recently, we had here the pdf of an early version of this book, for the convenience of the students. Unfortunately, our publisher demanded that we delete it. Advice to authors: (a) make sure you keep the copyright, and (b) do not publish with McGraw Hill."
We get a lot of awesome free material as a result.
College professors (collaboratively) write teaching materials that are copied and bound by the print shop of your school. Nowadays they're typically freely available in PDF, to registered students at least.
Nothing like American textbooks sold over $100 by big publishing companies.
Not everyone needs or should go to college, but we need good alternatives for those people.
I'm seeing more and more of my peers care less about a degree and more about quantifiable experience. I'd rather have a mid talent coder that's flexible and understand the larger problem set we're solving than someone highly skilled in algorithmic design (which is something i've seen).
Of course, you would also reduce learning by an equivalent amount...
Can you justify this claim? It's easy to observe that current students who take the same classes differ in the amount of learning they do.
I see no reason to believe that different students taking the same class schedule consisting of 0 classes would suddenly all learn the same amount. It seems more likely that they would continue to differ in the amount of learning they do.
It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.
The full professors don't have any such excuse, though.
You're left with underpaid adjuncts, under qualified TAs, and research professors that don't want to teach another-goddamned-section of Calculus 1 (as one of my profs referred to it).
this is the kind of crap that administrators (as a class in society) force on faculty and then use it as justification for "our role is necessary" and "see, they couldn't be that busy".
Personally, all the academic code I've used has been written by EE people or Applied Math people and had nice enough style/documentation/accessibility for me to have minimal issues.
Contracts vary. In both universities I attended (one mediocre, one in the top 5), in most departments, professor salaries were purely for education (9 month salary - get paid extra if they teach in summer), even though all the expectations for tenure, etc are research.
They are expected to do research, but the funds for that come from grants, not from their salaries.
So the contract was: Their salary was a 9 month salary, and they get to pay themselves the extra 3 months by getting grants for research. This is why many professors will say they can supplement their income by "up to a third" of their salary via grants. Which, BTW, also means that when you look up a public university professor's income (usually accessible to the public), you are seeing their 9 month income, and if they are active researchers, they get paid more.
So no, the university typically does not pay them to do the research. They pay themselves via grants. The university pays them for education, even though they always act as if they don't.
>I can understand the motivation for having professors teach advanced subjects, but having them teach intro classes is just silly. It's worse for both the students and the professor. Teaching and research are completely different skill sets after all.
All fine and well as long as the university does not try to attract students for undergrad by highlighting the great research they do, and indirectly imply that they will get an education from the best in the field. If their prospectus merely said "Come join us. You'll get a great education taught by adjuncts and outsourced to other companies", then your point would have more merit.
Speaking from the part-time professors perspective: occurring in parallel to this is a steady growth in course section sizes. 30 students used to be the norm for some courses, but 80-90 is the new normal just a few years later. Some of these tools are designed to help manage this. But the actual process of planning and delivering a lecture, providing individual feedback on written assignments (like exams), etc. is suffering.
Teaching effectively to a large section is harder than you might think, especially when teaching is only a fraction of your job & you have no TAs. But half-assing it is actually not too hard I guess. And you are seldom rewarded for the former. Thankfully for me and for my students, it is mostly a side hobby for me and not a living.
That seems to be the plan, instead of hiring more professors they grow class sizes, cut corners, and hire more admin.
That's not true. They're getting paid to publish research in third-party journals you have to pay to read.
Likely that was the mistake. I've been to both a small and a large university. If you care about education, go to the small one. Much more likely the professors will put in a lot of effort to teach properly. Fewer students per class also motivates them.
A small group of us got together that first evening and found enough typos, spelling and punctuation errors that we all passed the class with a high "A" without needing to do anything else.
He wasn't happy about it, and I think he later dropped the "unlimited" part. He was less upset when most of us went to class anyway -- The way I saw it, I paid for the class, even if I didn't have to worry about doing the work for a grade, I still wanted to learn something.
Another economics professor produced her own reader/workbook which was provided for the cost of photocopying and binding.
That kind of thing would be a free download today. Can you imagine paying thousands of dollars in tuition for a course, and then getting the entire textbook for free?
Those who do it are truly saints among scoundrels.
Not trying to tell you that there aren't some jackasses who do this for extra loot, but one good reason to rotate the problems is to prevent students from showing up with an answer key. ie: When I was in college our IEEE club had a more comprehensive question bank than any single prof at my uni.
I think he wrote the book so that students didn't have to spend money on a huge textbook containing information they don't need. This book had everything you needed for the class and not much more.
Why don't we just allow Pearson to bypass universities altogether and award degrees for cheaper than the 40,000 current universities cost.
Why don't we just cut out the extremely expensive middlemen, universities and professors ?
Isn't a publisher a third-party for-profit company? If you need to buy a book for a class to read and do homework in order to pass the class, that's okay right? So, why is it wrong to expect someone to do the same thing digitally?
The only way to complete MyMathLab homework is to pay out for a poorly-written Flash app.
I've often wondered whether a legal case could be made against universities for price gouging.
But the execution is so half-assed that it not only turns off students from the platform, but it runs the risk of turning them off to the actual subject matter as well. The whole thing had the stench of static requirements doc to a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor development pipeline with little to no end-user (that is, students, not department administrators) feedback in the development cycle.
It's a bit like self-driving cars in a way. The execution is everything, and the half-way hybridized situation is the most dangerous for the end-user. And the missed execution to me smells a bit like an arms race between Pearson, Wiley, etc. to get their platforms out and entrenched with individual departments before each other.
That is exactly what this is. Old fashioned conservatism.
The focus universities have on homework is absurd. If you want to practice 100+ math problems, you can invent them yourself, or even find plenty on the internet. It only takes one or two problems to show that the student understands the subject matter. Any more required homework is a waste of everyone's resources.
At my university there were campuses hundreds of miles away from each other so I imagine the department also had to pay for the travel and other arrangements needed to get these collaborative textbooks written.
One of these textbooks that I had to buy for the usual massive price was one of the collaborative efforts. However, for the purposes of the degree at the campus I was on, only needed the bits written by our head of department were needed for the syllabus, the rest of it was out of scope.
To use a software analogy it was like buying the student version of MS Office when you only needed Word and not the other bits of the bundle. That would mean carrying 43 discs around instead of just the 7 discs around. So you see the problem of carrying a huge textbook up and down a hill every day.
I never understood why the lecturers did not produce, update and polish proper course materials that did not require outside materials except for pure reference. They had expectations on us to do homework but I wasn't seeing the results of theirs.
I went to undergrad in the 90s & it was true for me then as well.
Most textbook companies are for-profit, and I needed the texts to complete the assignments.
A more common goal is acculturation and networking, which sending them to a foreign school will actively work against.
You could argue living in another country brings the similar benefit.
Though i agree that united states is pretty diverse from schools pov.
The current-1 edition of a textbook, purchased used on Amazon, is often 25-50% of the cost of the new textbook in the college bookstore...
Of course, open-source textbooks would be even better.
My main complaint is that their books are (intentionally) completely traditional in content and format: they're designed to be maximally easy for a "standard" existing course to switch to (since professors are often reluctant to throw out years of work in polishing their lectures). That means in particular that if you want a more modern textbook redesigned from the ground up based on (e.g.) physics education research, you're still stuck asking your students to pay big bucks for it.
Also, one negative observation I've seen as a chapter reviewer, at least for this particular text: by their very nature, these textbooks aren't the result of one passionate author with a cohesive vision and voice. They're written chapter by chapter by a variety of authors under a central project management team. So while the content winds up being solid (I hope), the text itself isn't really much fun to read. (Not that most textbooks do especially well in that department! But there are some good ones that do, and that can pay off for the class.)
Another favorite of mine that might be especially interesting to the HN crowd is Chabay and Sherwood's Matter and Interactions text. One key feature is its tight integration of simulations using "VPython", which students start to use within the first few weeks of class. That makes it viable to have students study realistic forces rather than just the simplest cases. (E.g. adding air resistance to projectile motion is just one more line of code, rather than requiring a course in differential equations.) That also makes it more reasonable for their book to give true equations from the start (like the equation for relativistic momentum rather than just p=mv) and then state the more familiar forms as approximations.
Randall Knight's Physics for Scientists and Engineers is a much more standard text than those two, but it's still worlds better than most traditional texts that I've used: it changes the old standards in smaller ways, but still incorporating lots of research-based improvements. (Knight's little book /Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching/ was a great introduction to Physics Education Research for me when I first started teaching, too.)
Eric Mazur, one of the real leaders of the Physics Education Research community, wrote a book not long ago called /Principles and Practice of Physics/. I haven't had a chance to really go through it in detail yet to get a feel for everything that makes it unique (one big structural change from tradition is that he focuses on students getting rock solid on 1D physics before introducing the complications of vectors), but he's such an expert in this stuff that I wouldn't want to leave his book off of the list. (It's organized in a bit of a weird way, mind you.)
I'm sure there are others that I haven't thought to list. Debora Katz has a new book that I just heard about that emphasizes case studies, for example. But yeah: almost any of these books are fundamentally different than the classics in some way, and worlds better in my opinion.
More links to other OER sources: https://www.oercommons.org/ http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/textbook-listings/textbo... https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/SearchResults.aspx?subjec... http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/c.php?g=160393&p=1053364
I also know of at least a dozen absolutely amazing free textbooks published by the authors, sometimes even with .tex sources available on github.
Perhaps it's not a question of availability but of discoverability? Also, it would be nice if teachers could mix content from different sources of OER in order to create custom books.
What are your ideas for products that might someday have a successful open source version?
As mentioned by /u/darkengine Pearson and Blackboard have their claws in as well.
In my experience, most faculty simply take the lowest friction route.
They also mention Amazon's text book rental (but I haven't done any price comparisons on that).
imo, Pearson is really evil, I live in Taiwan and still lots of classes in the top universities use Pearson textbooks, and lots of students pay for their solutions on Chegg, which makes it all more absurd.
1) We continue to need new textbooks: Despite relative little change in core materials for subjects like Calculus, there is a need for adaptation of texts to include current applications and methods.
2) The best use of interactive media to complement and enhance learning is yet to be determined.
3) The worst crime of textbook companies is lack of innovation.
Every single item that contributes to the learning objectives of this course is incredibly Google-able, but as new students to the field, they do need at least some curation and direction to keep from getting overwhelmed. They need a reference resource that they can trust which is academic enough to be true, yet reasonably conversational. Textbooks used to fill this role, but publishers priced and walled-gardened themselves out of relevance.
Side note: if you're an professor who has done something like this in the past, I'd love to compare notes with you.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs2510/Lectures.html
The NEU course assumes that students have taken How to Design Programs in Racket, so the early notes refer to Racket syntax. I'm working on notes for a Racket-less introduction that uses the same tools for my course right now:
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp17/cse11-a/Lectures.html
These notes also rely on a particularly good testing library that is capable of doing things like comparing objects for structural equality without requiring that students define a .equals() method first, which can be incredibly helpful for getting off the ground.