The Fall of the Ivory Tower

[ss20ts]

One of my pet peeves is the cost of text books, especially for Gen. Ed. courses. When I started at a B&M decades ago, your only option was to buy from the school bookstore, or luck out and buy from someone who'd taken the course. Next came the Internet. Yay! With just the ISBN, you could buy a textbook from anywhere!

Now, colleges have businesses  create digital books for them, and they cannot be used for other schools. And don't buy a used one 'cause it may not have the "vital" lab access. Or a new edition comes out every few years. All of this is NOT for cutting edge classes, I'm talking about courses like Microeconomics. It seems like many of the PowerPoint presentation, quizzes, etc. are devised by these companies. What ARE the professor's doing/creating to add value to the course?

Why aren't more colleges using sites like OpenStax?

Absolutely! A thousand percent. I was hit hard by sticker shock when I went to CSU Global. One courses had a $150 video game which we had to purchase for the class. You got to run through it ONCE. You couldn't play the game over or start over if you started off the wrong way because you misunderstood the poor directions. In another class, I got to use a FREE Harvard simulator that I could do over and over and over until the end of the term. 

At UMPI, there are no outside textbooks. ALL of the reading material is included in the online learning platform which is AWESOME. It's saved me hundreds. Most course content hasn't changed much at any school. Some topics won't have updates for years - if ever. It's not like we're taking History of the 2000's. Your books shouldn't cost as much as your tuition. Yes, I had that happen at community college. 

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This is the reality. As long as people are willing to take out astronomically large loans and pay ridiculously inflated tuition, nothing will change. When a critical mass finally says, ‘enough’ and refuses to play the game then colleges will adapt. Hopefully the programs elucidated here will help people see alternative paths.

Curiously the author ignores the special status of student loans in bankruptcy in his theory of high costs.  He also intimates that college students are making choices based on perceived safety as opposed to economics. I’m not sure I can agree with that.

Student loans from the federal government aren't eligible for bankruptcy. The only way to escape them is to die. Literally.