Posted on 07/19/2008 10:58:20 AM PDT by Graybeard58
After two decades of unconscionable increases in tuition and fees, colleges and universities increasingly are employing a new scam to swindle students and their parents out of whatever pennies they have left: the custom textbook.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, publishers make a few minor tweaks to a standard textbook, jack up the price and sell the special edition to the captive thousands who are required to buy it for required courses. For example, the University of Alabama requires all 4,000 of its freshmen to pay $59.35 for a spiral-bound special edition of "A Writer's Reference." The university's version is for all practical purposes identical to a non-custom edition that sells for $54 new and about $30 used. The English department pockets $3 of the higher price; the publisher (Boston-based Bedford/St. Martin's) keeps the rest.
A note on the back cover says "This book may not be bought or sold used," which is unenforceable except that it prevents the school's bookstore from handling used copies. Students still can sell copies directly, but the university makes such sales as hard as it can.
At Penn State, students until recently were soaked for even more money in the same way. The 10,000 students taking the introductory economics course were required to buy a custom text, and for each one sold, the economics department got a $10 kickback ... er, sorry ... "royalty." Susan Welch, dean of Penn State's college of liberal arts, told the Journal the university was uncomfortable "making money on students like that." Uncomfortable? Sticking a gun in a student's ribs to steal his or her lunch money would be only slightly less dishonest.
Nationwide, custom texts have expanded to 12 percent of the college-textbook market. Each year, students are forced to spend $403 million on such books. At the 10 percent markup used in Alabama, that's $40.3 million a year in unnecessary extra expense.
Some universities long have had policies forbidding the assignment of texts from which any faculty member or department at the university might receive royalties. A May 2007 congressional study indicated lawmakers in 34 states had passed or proposed legislation barring inducements to professors for adopting textbooks.
Given the financial profligacy of Connecticut's state-run colleges and universities, and the temptation the practice provides, having such preventive legislation on the books in this state would be a wise precaution.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this list, let me know.
For all of my “hard science” and math courses in college, I just bought WAAY used old texts for next to nothing. My classmates thought I was wierd.
I tried to explain that “calculus was calculus”. It doesn’t matter which text one uses - it all HAS to have the same crap in it.
What’s even worse is when they change the textbook (version) almost every semester, and the school no longer uses the previous book, rendering it un-returnable (even for the $10 they give you for a text that cost $100+ new!).
I tried to explain that “calculus was calculus”. It doesn’t matter which text one uses - it all HAS to have the same crap in it.
Gasp. No Gay and Minority Calculus?
How can you Differentiate between lifestyles???
How can we Integrate Society???
Unless the prof assigns certain questions or homework for the course and it has to be turned in. Of course, I guess you could “borrow” somebody else’s or check it out at the college library if they happened to have a copy of the textbook.
I figured our fairly early on that my job in college introductory courses was to learn the material. If a class didn’t focus on material in the book, I’d often go with what I thought was the best book—not just the one the professor assigned to us.
Well, there came a time sitting in an economics class where I had asked a question, and the professor pointed me to a picture in the assigned text. At which point I said I hadn’t been using that book and was using another and asked for clarification regarding the picture. The professor asked me why I had gone with the other text, to which I responded that I thought it was a lot more thorough and more concise at once.
Thing is, I didn’t realize that my professor was the author of the assigned text. ;)
A few snickers went up across the room, and it was only afterwards that I learned our professor authored the assigned text.
A friend of mine named Pat used the same “Principles of Biochemistry” book for just about every class. We called it “Pat’s Bible”. He got the same A I did, and didn’t pay $50 for a different text book.
Biochemistry is Biochemistry.
Yeah, most of the textbooks our kids used for their Community College courses were like that. Fortunately we found a used Physics text for our daughter that was only originally sold overseas. It cost $50 less than the one sold at the Univ. bookstore, and it was identical! She had no problem using it for the class.
The only new books I ever bought in college were texts related to my major - I knew I wanted to keep them after I graduated. All my other books were used.
They’re bitching about paying 59$ for a textbook?
When I got my CS degree, most of the books cost at least $100.
read later
How can we Integrate Society???
Now, cut that out -- you're pushing the Limits here.
Universities have become not much more than money mills. They are not even diploma mills anymore.
If they do not like what the institution is selling, they should take their business elsewhere.
The restaurant or the university exists for one reason, to sell stuff for more than they paid for it. I wish these winers would just shut up, as we all know, they are just itching for more subsidies.
Sure, it would be cheaper to bring your own food into some restaurants. Good Lord.
Barnes & Noble has the domination on the school bookstore market. And to prohibit the sale of used textbooks it plainly unconstitional.
I want a federal investigation into price-fixing and monopoly practices in public university bookstores.
They profit off the taxpayer system.
Yep I personally encountered this several times myself. And even other faculty that had to use the substandard "department" text were not happy with it.
They would take a standard text, swap a few chapters, change a few words and bump the price by 200% - 300%.
As long as they let the original publisher print and sell their text they were all making money so one cared about plagiarism.
We knew it was a screw job and some of us paying our own way complained, but no one cared what we thought.
Many students had their way paid by daddy or were getting government help or getting their texts on scholarships and grants and they didn't care what the texts cost.
These licenses would proscribe certain rights that purchasers of intellectual property (IP) once enjoyed. The right to re-sell an original copy of IP was recently affirmed by the courts, but mechanisms countervaling copyrightholders overreaching leave consumers at a distinct disadvantage. They have to sue to see their rights restored, as opposed to rightsholders who can call upon LEOs to enforce their new-found rights under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.
My relevant personal experience in combating patent infringement led me to understand that former President Clinton politicized this area and milked corrupt campaign contributions to allow illegal influence to change the outcome of many cases and affect laws that extended copyright and were intrinsic to the DMCA. See boat hull designers' special treatment
Support your Congresscritters to repeal the DMCA and reduce the length of copyrights, which, for example, has Michael Jackson credibly threatening to sue any business establishment that might allow waitstaff to sing the more-than-100-year-old "Happy Birthday" to its clientele, and has thwarted the intention of the Founders to see intellectual property become public domain after a limited period of time, once no more than 17 or 27 years, but since Clinton, in some cases it has been extended to be over ninety years.
Meanwhile, as with sharks who sense blood in the water, one wealthy cartel attempts to extend its rights via the courts: the MPAA time and again tries to circumvent the ruling that permitted time shifting in the first place.
HF
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