Why not go after the criminal enterprises known as Text Book publishers?
It's one of the biggest scams ever that would make even Ponzi blush. Issue new textbooks every year and call them revisions, which cost about as much as a quarter of tuition itself.
I don't understand why someone like Amazon doesn't jump in and have the textbooks on a Kindle, so students don't destroy their backs carrying textbooks.
Many rent books now. The online used prices are good too but may become hard to find do to renting.
I’ve had it with the Educational Industrial Complex. Besides fattening their wallets, they’ve succeeded in producing a stunningly ignorant populace of debtors trained only to continue feeding the beast.
Absolutely! The cost of textbooks continue to match the willingness of those who buy them to pay - Just like college tuition. Anyone that thinks the actual cost of providing a college education has gone up as much as the tuition rates have skyrocketed is a fool.
But because of government involvement and and the proliferation of both “free money” as well as loans (now totally handled by government as well - so much for any bit of free market) - and the lie now poured out for decades on students that you HAVE to get a college education to be anything or to ever hope to make a living... Demand has driven up the cost well beyond the actual cost. So we see big, multi-$million building programs across many campuses -to meet both perceived needs as well as to be “nicer than the others” to compete for ever more dollars.
And the textbook publishers are every bit as guilty of false inflation - by publishing new editions every couple of years - and driving the forced adoption of the new editions, with just enough difference between them to make it impractical to hold on to the “old” edition for a few years. 9 out of 10 College courses do not have so much new to NEED to update textbooks... A 10 year (or even 5) cycle would dramatically decrease textbook prices.
Nah.
Why not just print your own?
Or better yet, why PRINT anything??
So true.
The proof will be if this GooPer applies the same tax relief to used textbooks. And I don't mean just commercial resellers but Sam Student trying to resell his $325 specialty engineering textbook on Amazon.
If not, you know who has been stuffing money in GooPer's hole...
Or the REAL criminals here, the professors who write the books. Can't speak for today, but when I went to college in the 1970s, at least half of the "required" books for classes beyond fundamentals were authored or co-authored by the professors who were "teaching" the course.
A great second source of income for them, since, for a price, they lent their name to the course while having grad students do the teaching, and wrote the book for royalties from the publishers. Yeah, not all of the professors were goniffs, but enough were to make it memorable some 40 years later!