I say cancel all federal financial aid except Merit based scholarships. all you have to do is look at the different housing for university presidents to no what’s happening with student aid money. if you did that there would be about 2-3 years for the university system to adjust but I bet the universities would cut there tuition fast and the cost of books would go down also..20 years ago my Biology book was 100 dollars hate to think the cost today
When I completed my engineering master’s in 2013, nearly all of my teachers were rebelling against the textbook system. That’s a racket, too. A new edition of the textbook is always coming out that changes the order of homework questions and/or changes numbers so the answers are a little different. Nearly all of my teachers said, “I’m not going to make you buy a $200 textbook for this course.” They’d have us buy a book a few editions back from Amazon (or any number of other textbook outlets) for literally like $20 and teach out of that.
I had to buy two books for Numerical Methods. One was $5 and the other was $1. The shipping was literally more expensive than the book.
In Linear Systems Theory, our teacher wrote a textbook in the early ‘80s. He had released all copyrights and let us download a PDF of his book for free off the university website, that’s what he taught to. Interesting guy, he got his Ph.D. in 1963 and worked on Mariner 10 among other spacecraft. This guy designed the control system that rotates the spacecraft to keep the instruments and antennas pointed in the right direction. This dude is a bona fide genius, his first job out of college was Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He got a master’s degree in math, realized there’s no money in it, so he went back and got a master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Needless to say, this dude is as old as the rocks on campus and is teaching to this day. OK, I’m rambling.