Comment by nebulosa
19 days ago
Some of these observations aren't particularly surprising, but this line really took me out of it:
> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.
The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.
I live near Big State U. The median student drops that much money on booze over two weeks (or one week if it’s an important holiday like Halloween or Saint Patrick’s day).
What I see is that the declining interest in the life of the mind that was already evident a generation earlier has accelerated, particularly during the COVID years. I see this as the reversion of a historical anomaly. In the postwar era, a number of things converged: the GI Bill allowed a lot of ambitious new blood to enter the university system, competition with the Soviets ensured generous funding, and many the finest brains of a generation of Europeans relocated to the US. This all started to come undone in the late 1960s, when the counterculture made the establishment start to question the value of the academy, the world war 2 GIs finished their educations, and the cream of 1930s Europe died off. Really, it’s surprising how long we’ve been able to sustain a decline since then.
They’ve been sucking up international students from Asia mostly to fill in the gap just like everything else. Let superior countries raise them then bring them over with the lure of big money. It’s all the US has to offer anymore is a chance for the select few to become part of the 1%, oligarchy. 300 million normal people may as well not exist here.
From what I can tell, children of foreign elites are about as serious about education as students born in the US, but they drive luxury cars, live in fancy off campus housing, and find different things to do that aren’t the assigned reading. The number of Lamborghinis in town is all out of proportion to the area’s income.
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I guess I'm on the other side of this. $30-100 is a reasonable price for books for a college-level course in the United States.
Assuming this https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college is accurate, tuition at the mid-level state university in the article is probably around $10k/year. That's more than it should be, but why would you play $10k/year for classes then not buy the books?
For the overwhelming majority of students, tuition is not paid out of pocket. It's paid with loans. They see it as an investment towards a career which will allow them to pay back those loans. For many, the weight of their debt does not sink in until well after college. Meanwhile, textbooks are an immediate cost with an immediate impact on a student's financial situation.
I attended university in the early 2010s. After my freshman year I stopped buying textbooks for most classes. More than just their cost, I found that most textbooks really were optional. Most professors never even referenced them throughout the course. I figured I could always buy a book later if I found out I needed it, but that never happened. The few books I actually did buy after my freshman year were all mistakes. I have not read any of them and I had no trouble with their associated classes.
It sounds like the professor who wrote this article actually incorporates the course material he assigns. Good for him. But in my experience that is quite rare.
> For the overwhelming majority of students, tuition is not paid out of pocket. It's paid with loans. They see it as an investment towards a career which will allow them to pay back those loans. For many, the weight of their debt does not sink in until well after college. Meanwhile, textbooks are an immediate cost with an immediate impact on a student's financial situation.
Textbooks can equally well be paid for with college loans, they aren't restricted to tuition-only.
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The best was when you could download the book and share a PDF with the class. Fuck the textbook industry, it's extortionate.
I would, however, be thrilled to find a $35 text. The average cost of my upper division textbooks was closer to $200 each. Some courses would assign multiple books.
> More than just their cost, I found that most textbooks really were optional. Most professors never even referenced them throughout the course.
Imho that’s what makes the textbook overpriced: the usefulness in the course. In my academic years i’ve seen some textbook that are actually pleasant to read and that you could actually rely on, alone, to pass the course… and then so many books that where completely useless: either more of a reference than anything else or some poorly written text by the same professor holding the course.
At some point I resorted to ligben first, and then bookstore later and only if the book did deliver some actual value.
Because it is an additional expense and fairly often you don't actually need it. You are paying a lot of money for that one chapter you will maybe have to read and whose content you can likely find elsewhere.
Plus, the idea that everyone should buy it is bonkers. There are or should be libraries in school that costs $10k a year. Or at least, there should be used book from last year or rhat one book 5 friends bought together. All these would be financially reasonable decisions.
Have you seen what books cost? Not textbooks, like those from Pearson or something, but regular books.
This guy is a philosophy professor, so if he is assigning a book every 1-2 weeks, in a 14-week semester, let’s say that’s like 8 books.
Buying 8 books for under $100 is cheap. It does sound like he takes care to craft an affordable syllabus.
Of course, if you are taking 5 classes a semester it’s gonna add up, but this is really not on the egregious end of things.
In fairness, as a philosophy major, I realized fairly early on that most of what we read was out of copyright. I suppose if he's assigning stuff that is ABOUT what some philosophers wrote, it makes sense, but forgive me if I prefer just saving money to read Aristotle from Project Gutenberg.
And sure, there is more contemporary philosophy, and it's great he's keeping the books affordable. But if it's anything early 20th century or prior, don't be so surprised people are going to read what's in the public domain instead.
Haha what I remember in those cases was that the main value in having the assigned book was being able to same page during class discussions.
I mean, literally the same page — so if someone says “what did ya’ll think about this quote on p.156” I could actually get to it in time instead of scrambling to find the passage in whatever I printed out from Project Guttenberg.
For this reason my strategy to save book money was usually to get the assigned books from the library and camp out in front of the copy machine for an afternoon.
We used to peruse the library back in the day.
Ha I would spend a couple hours in front of the library copy machine at the start of the semester, and then take my stack to the store and get it bound myself.
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She is teaching courses that involve reading books. In her words: “I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre”. Five or more books plus a textbook might cost $100. (And yes of course all of these are on Gutenberg and Libgen, but the point is that the kids don’t read them either way.)
Setting aside Libgen (never used it, don’t know anything about it), it’s unlikely that any of those authors is available on Gutenberg in a modern, critical translation. Reading primary texts in their publication language was dead or dying even when I was a philosophy major, but still it’s impossible to do close textual analysis without a scholarly translation.
I know some of the early translations of e.g. Nietzche sometimes end up saying the opposite of what might have been intended, which is a downer.
I guess that anyone which, on top of being an English native, can read both French and German, and are confident that they can grasp anything from some of their most sybilin hermeneuticians, is really far from the average student, whatever their nationality.
The linked text is clearly announcing it's focused on the average student, not the top of bottom tiers.
I'm not sure about the opinion that the author implies about Harry Potter, but I'm confident the series is an easier read and still give you plenty of opportunity to discuss about philosophical and literacy topics.
Anyway, that's definitely an interesting reading, I forwarded it to my wife who teach as a physician, something I rarely feel like relevant to do with HN posts.
At least they have physical textbooks. Many classes now only provide links to a PDF document and the students still pay $100-$200 for the privilege. Plus, you can’t recover a portion of the cost of the book by reselling it nor can students save money by buying used books.
I disagree that K through 12 is not part of the problem though. The presence of phones in schools, especially smart phones, has definitely had an impact on the learning skills of students. In the old days, if you will, people had to pass physical pieces of paper around in class secretly to communicate, which was riskier and usually a one or two time event. Smart phones are a Pandora’s box of distractions. I also blame schools for lowering their standards to accommodate the lower standards of the students entering their schools. The schools are simply passing these students down the down the river of eventual disappointment. There should be remedial courses and schools should dismiss students that are not willing or able to pass these courses in order to have the ability to perform at an acceptable level.
Taking their money and providing a degree when they haven’t actually learned the material is borderline fraud.
Pfft one of my text books isn’t even a PDF— it’s a proprietary app that requires internet access and is 350mb. Doesn’t allow copy and paste either of course. And I’m sure I’ll have to pay another $60 for the license again next semester for the second part of the class.
THAT is gross. At least when books were expensive, you knew you could recoup some of that cost the following year selling them back. It also meant you could buy them cheaper used. Assuming you didn't have a professor assigning their own texts and insisting you got the latest edition...
It’s your moral duty to dump that app, extract the contents and make a torrent out of it.
I know I’ll be flagged and downvoted for this but I don’t care.
It's worse than that: many textbooks are actually subscription services.
Yes, this is it. You can usually find some discounted or free way to get most books, but I had classes where you literally submitted homework through the same system you accessed the book through, and it was like $150.
> students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students.
Yeah well, 40 years ago that is what my textbooks cost. I was surprised by that quote that they were so inexpensive.
Tuition at similar (second tier state) schools is going to be ~$6000 per semester! It goes up from there.
What's going on that the students have the resources for the tuition but not books at 5-10% of that cost (that's a 4 course load with books costing $100-150 per course)?
Don't know how school funding operates in the US so this is a guess:
Parents cover the fees and give the kids an allowance for the rest; either the kids budget poorly or the allowance fails to really account for just how expensive the first few weeks are with all the books you're expected to buy?
The average parent in the US can't afford an extra $12000 per year in expenses. College students take out loans to pay for their education. I'm not sure what the average debt load is currently, but people I personally know who got away with a "small" student loan debt owed around $30000, and I've known people with >$100k student loan debt just from an undergraduate education.
Parents covering school mostly went away in the 90's outside of the particularly wealthy segments of society. Mostly student loans since then, which people hope to have paid off by the time they retire to avoid having their social security payments garnished. Joking of course; nobody assumes social security will still be there.
I went to college in The 1990s, and that is low priced by comparison—not even adjusted for inflation, just by nominal prices.
I graduated in 1992 with my undergrad in CS - my CS books were $100+ per class back then. I think the Dragon Book was $140.
Aaah I loved the dragon book!
I don't. Outdated on release.
A considerate professor would allow using an older or multiple editions of the books, and assign appropriate readings or problems for multiple editions. Libgen e-books are a strictly better product anyways: you don't have to carry it around and you can annotate them without the notes being inside the book.
20 years ago, I would get the book list from the professor and purchase the identical "international editions" of the same books on Ebay, shipped out from Macmillan India or a foreign imprint publisher. They were probably 1/3rd of the US price, but the content was identical.
Often times, professors would allow us to purchase earlier editions of the book for our coursework, which were a fraction of the cost of the most recent edition.
Worst case scenario, I could reserve the book at the school library, but I'd have to move fast as there'd only be a handful of copies available.
For those who want to do that today there is no need to bother with eBay or shipping from abroad. The publishers tried to stop them claiming copyright violation but the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the first sale doctrine applies [1].
Since that ruling many independent booksellers in the US started importing those foreign editions and selling them through online marketplaces such as Abe Books and Biblio.
Here are some examples of the savings. Lets say you are a math student, and your introductory calculus is taught from the first volume of Apostol's Calculus, your multivariable calculus taught from the second volume, and you real and complex analysis class uses Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis.
The US editions of those will set you back around $220 for the first volume of Apostol, around $140 for the second volume, and around $240 for Rudin.
On Abe Books you can get the international editions of the Apostol books from a US seller for $24.39 for volume 1 and $23.40 for volume 2 with free shipping. There are several more US sellers with then in the $30-40 range.
For the Rudin book $22.06 will get it from a US seller on Abe Books with free shipping. There are few more US sellers in the $35-50 range.
Biblio isn't as good on these particular books. They are available at comparable price but only from Indian sellers with shipping from India.
I haven't seen the international edition of Rudin but I have both the US and international editions of both volumes of Apostol and the text is the same. It is the physical form that differs. The US edition is hardback printed on finer paper. The international edition is a paperback printed on rougher paper and the pages are smaller.
[1] Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013)
I did take class out of Tommy I and II and used the international editions. Having taught linear algebra myself since I wouldn’t use it for linear algebra because some of the stuff in there for numerics is outdated.
At my university, every teacher published a PDF with the material on their website. In other to pass the exam, I was expected to familiarize myself with the PDF. Obviously, the PDF could be very long and complicated, but that's beside the point. I don't understand why this system is so controversial.
It's interesting, in my country if a classmate bought a textbook I would assume they bought the one because they love the subject and are going to keep using it after college. I don't think I ever actually saw someone buy a textbook.
Honestly, that doesn't sound uncommon even for the classes I took 20 years ago.
A single book in a non-literature class could easily go for more than that. CS was especially bad in this regard, for some reason.
I wish my books were that cheap. 20 years ago. Even used they were well above that price.
$100 for books for a single course would have seemed cheap to me 30 years ago.
Yes, I had the exact same thought. $35 is a lot of money to people who aren't tenured professors or fully employed developers like myself now.
The lack of understanding of economic realities just kinda stinks.
It was a long time ago now, but the biggest reason I ended in a local two-year college instead of a four-year university was I simply couldn't afford the $20 application fees. I only applied to two schools because it was all I could afford.