The onion no longer makes me laugh. It just brings me sadness.
Home schooling for dummies produces more anti-critical thinking drones.
I took a summer class once and totally blew it off. Didn’t spend the money for all the textbooks and scraped by somehow. I didn’t buy all the textbooks because I didn’t have the money for them all. But I wasn’t at all broke. I could have found a way. I’m lucky to have had that privilege.
Apparently, we have no real idea what’s going on in terms of school gun violence, beyond the really big headlines.
While we’re on the subject of student loans…remember back in 2007 when Ted Kennedy and several members of congress sponsored legislation called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Act, which was passed into law and signed off on by GW Bush (lest anyone think this was another Obama era hand out)? It was a nice piece of legislation aimed directly at stopping the escalating flight from public service careers by recent college graduates due to the lower salaries in said careers and high student loan debt being a toxic mix. Work for the government, a non-profit, certain healthcare sector jobs, etc. for a few years and get partial forgiveness on your loans, saving you tens of thousands in interest and principle over the term of your participation.
Well, turns out, like most things government run these days, it was a clusterfuck.
Of course, the Trump Administration is actively working to make things even worse:
The Best People, Drain The Swamp, #MAGA, Etc…
These people do not want you to go to college. They want you to go to a technical training program, at best, to become a skilled drone. The last thing they want is for you to go to an actual college or university and be exposed to critical thinking, research, evidence-based argument, or anything at all that might make you less easily victimized by corporate America. They get support for doing it by convincing the under-employed and lower income folks who vote Republican that college perpetuates the snooty elitist liberals they love to hate.
That is literally what Adam Putnam is running on here. He has a commercial where he talks about ‘elites’ making kids go to college when they should go to a technical school to get a ‘real job’. Scumbag.
And because the liberal elite really has not done a good job, or any job at all come to think about it, of working to communicate with and support the people Putnam is trying to reach, the message gets traction. No, liberals aren’t to blame, but the leadership of the Democratic party and the general top-tier of the progressive/liberal political population has pretty much pissed on everyone not in their social and political circle, which doesn’t make things easier. We need much more of the down to earth salt of the earth style liberalism and social justice focus and less of the white wine and Volvo set.
Last night my college freshman son and I sat down to order his books for fall semester. What a complete and shameless scam college “textbooks” are these days. 30+ years ago you could buy a used Principles of Economics for around 33% of the price of a new one, and all you had to worry about was the occasional new edition being released at the same time you were registered for the class, forcing you to purchase new. Apparently publishers weren’t making enough money because of the secondary market, so they started releasing new editions annually, until they got caught releasing “new” editions that contained no updated information, just new covers and rearranged chapters.
Now the hot new scam is “access codes”. Instead of a physical textbook, you are purchasing an online code to access a digital textbook, or in some cases to access digital content that is paired with a physical textbook. Obviously those cannot be purchased “used”, so every purchase is a new “book” purchase, at outrageous new book prices.
Luckily my son has several classes where the professors told the students to skip certain purchases and/or purchase an older edition, used, physical book for cheap from Amazon or Chegg. What could have easily been a $500 expense became more like $300 thanks to budget-conscious professors. Still, it was an eye-opening experience, and yet another facet of what is wrong with the escalating costs of higher education in this country. $200+ for a CODE to access an online version of a textbook and associated worksheets/materials. Fucking ridiculous.
I mean it may vary, but for my engineering classes the price differential in ebooks versus the new with codes that it literally paid for my Surface Pro in two years.
Two years where I was part time, taking about 9 classes in the span.
It’s obscene, but I could reliably save $150 on an e-book versus physical, or more.
This was as recent as 2016.
It totally is. For whatever it’s worth, renting textbooks via amazon worked well for my son. They would also normally have access codes available to buy.
I mean I financed the purchase of a thousand dollar tablet computer in two years of part time college classes purely through the savings of e-books over physical.
That is properly obscene
My son had to buy a “clicker” for his Biology class this fall. It’s basically an electronic multiple choice device used in the classroom. $50. My favorite are the “Books” that are just reams of loose paper.
This is crazy, since you can get a clicker app for a smart phone.
When I saw it I just shook my head. I don’t know how you go up against that kind of thing with a college and win. The fail is epic.
It’s a complicated problem. For the record, I 100% agree with all the criticisms of these textbook scams. I’m lucky enough to be at a school where I can pretty much determine what books I use, and for the very few classes that have specific requirements at the divisional level, we’ve made damn sure those books are not textbooks, but rather actual, well, books you can get on Amazon, as ebooks, at a used book store, whatever, for cheap. The vast majority of readings I have for my students are delivered through the learning management system as PDFs, ebooks, or links via our library. I would say “free,” but really the students pay for them via tuition, but you get the point.
Many schools have contracts with companies like Follette, whose business is running college bookstores. Sometimes those contracts require the school to funnel their book requirements through the store. Sucks, but the stores are revenue centers for the college and schools are looking for anything to give them more revenue. Another thing is that different disciplines have very different, shall we say, traditions, when it comes to books. I come from a humanities/social science (History, Political Science) background where other than for super-basic intro courses, no one uses textbooks anyhow, and monographs or articles are what you go for. These are quite easily found in a variety of formats. In many disciplines like business and its sub-sets (accounting, finance, marketing, advertising, etc.), sciences, education, engineering, etc., though, there is still a real tradition of dense, often hugely expensive, textbooks. Sometimes it’s because instructors really feel their subjects require tons of rote learning. Sometimes it’s because there are regulatory or licensing issues that require rigid adherence to very specific criteria only deliverable through certified textbooks apparently. And other times, professors simply are lazy and don’t want to change what they’ve been doing, which sometimes consists of simply letting the textbook do the work. And yes, in some probably fairly rare cases, it’s a scam because the professor or her or his buddies write the textbooks and they actually make money off of them. Doesn’t happen nearly as often as you might think, but it does occasionally.
A lot of this stuff could easily be fixed if it wasn’t for lingering questions of intellectual property. There is a lot of gray area in fair use for education, and while a college or university may well allow individual faculty, within the confines of their own class and within their bit of the learning management system (which is a secure access-controlled environment) to work with electronic copies of works that are arguably being used under fair use standards, but which could possible be considered to violate copyright laws. What the colleges or universities won’t do is endorse as a blanket policy such use, nor will they ditch their bookstore contracts and all in on digital, fair use, and open source, for a variety reasons ranging from legal challenges to loss of revenue.
I’ll be honest and say I never thought of that angle. Now I’m reminded of TWO things I can’t stand; our copyright system (which is crucially important but simultaneously @#$%ed up) AND the cost of higher education.
Yes, the entire copyright system is upgefucked. For example, our library can get ebooks or paper books. Paper books cost, well, what paper books cost, and the library gets them for 10-30% off usually. So, let’s say for an average book it might be twenty or thirty bucks. It can be checked out by one user at a time, or put on reserve, etc. The same book in an ebook format, with a similar one user at a time limit, might cost…nearly $200. Why? Greed of course but the publisher will say it’s because, no matter how robust their copy protection is, an electronic book will eventually get pirated and they’ll lose out on revenue from their product.
Now, I’m all in favor of authors making money for their books. And I’m in favor of publishers getting their cut as well. But when the cost of goods is miniscule to non-existent, especially after the initial costs (editing, formatting, etc.) are covered, you’d think the thing to do would be to adopt reasonable pricing in the hopes that most people will pay for it, rather than gouge and know for a fact people will pirate you. But, nope.
Most faculty want to use material that is up to date, change that material when things change, and make it available cheaply or for free to students. Much academic publishing, though, is based on an entirely different and entirely hostile model, which seeks to maximize revenue by limiting access and trying to make limited high cost distribution a selling point for authors–it’s more prestigious to have a $250 book no one will read than it is to have a $30 book in some cases (scholarly stuff, not NYT best sellers obviously).