Wouldn't it be fair use if the class just copied content for those two assignments? It is using only small portion of the whole thing after all.

You need to five-whys this before suggesting a solution. Start by asking whether whoever was in charge of requiring the $250 textbook benefited personally from its purchase.

It's more likely they were lazy and conformed to the status quo. You know, the old never attribute to malice what is easily explained by ignorance.

Depends, I took economics modules at University, and that was the only subject where the mandatory course textbook was co-written by the module leader. Well, co-written is strong: they added ten exercise questions and some call out boxes to the default Pearson textbook. Naturally, it was 40% more expensive.

School and professor dependent. I had a few professors at UVA who authored the book being used in class.

I also had a few who made copies of the chapters they wanted from whatever books and had the library hold those copies for us. We would just check them out normally, make our own copy (or read, take notes) and return for the next person.

Is it more likely? The most overpriced books I was required to buy were the ones the professor wrote.

I would have gone to the book store, fotographed the two chapters. - When I was a university student, our professor would copy relevant chapters and hand them to us (in Berlin). We would only buy those books we used extensively.

That happens in the Unites States as well, especially when the professor doesn't stand to profit from book sales (and/or the author is long-dead) and the amount of reading is relatively small. I received a number of these kinds of stapled "books" over my undergraduate years. This included some from the author of one of the books in question.

I'm not sure it's fully on the up-and-up given intellectual property laws, but life is full of gray areas. At the time piracy was not the option it is today (no libgen or torrent sites, Usenet wasn't much help, and the web was sparkly-new), so those breaks were very much appreciated — especially for my classes in Attic Greek, where the relevant textbooks were now rare (though once very common) and unlikely to get much use outside of the class. We did have to buy the Loeb editions of a bunch of original texts (Greek on one side, translation on the other), but I have no issue with that, and they were readily available on the used market. I still have them.

I also remember an expensive discrete math book. I came home for the holidays and was doing some exercises when my dad found his copy from when he was at university. Most sections were word for word idential, but the problems were all different. His had a chapter on Fortran too.

I was told they scramble the order of problems so they can keep the books the same but force you to buy new editions in order to have the same problem numbers at what gets assigned.

Basically minimizing cost to extort more cash.

I still remember my math teacher that specifically told us to get a certain version of the textbook, and the version he specified was 1 or 2 editions old. Ended up costing me something like $20 to buy used vs $100 new.

I had a class where the textbook did that. I always would get last year's books to save more than a few coins, but the professor of this class would go through the problems in-class, and they were all different from what was in my book. I went to his office hours to understand why the problems he went over were different from the ones in my book, and he immediately lectured "Ahhhh you must have bought an older book from the bargain bin. I require this year's book in my class and this is how I know who failed to pay for the correct book." The professor was the author of the book, of course. It was at that point it sunk in what a huge grift higher-education was.

I forgot the professor's name, but if you're reading this, fuck you, Dr. Shithead (and all the other Shithead professors who do this).

Incredible that this kind of corruption is tolerated in the credentials industry, most other industries would not tolerate someone making money from customers that way.

Can you imagine going to McDonalds and the guy won’t serve you your drink unless you buy a cup from his side business?

It's awful, and it's shameful but nobody feels shame anymore. The moral bar is "what can I legally get away with taking from the world" now. Nobody is even capable of feeling shame for their actions. It's just "bank account goes up" = "i'm right".

At my community college, the third semester of a three semester general physics course needed a new textbook, even though it covered substantially the same material. The prof explained why: his friends wrote this book. He was the only professor who taught the third course. That really prepared me for the experience once I transferred to a university.

  > failed to pay for the correct book.

The failure here was not the student's. Not the cutie professor, really. It was the dean who allows this who failed.

maybe Dean is a coauthor and is getting part of royalties as well? Happens more often than you think

And thus was the start of a new pirate, and Dr. Shithead lost even more money.

Many of my professors would mention the problem numbers for both the current version, and the previous version, to deal with that specifically.

I studied a semester abroad (Erasmus) in Portugal and I was so surprised that the expectation there was to get the course book photocopied. The university had a copy room where you pay for a literal copied version of the book that someone made with a xerox machine.

In the 90s in the US, for more hard science and math courses, the course was taught against course notes that you needed to buy from one of the many print shops next to the university. This was spiral bound, often a couple hundred pages and costing 20-40$ because that is how much a short run print job costed. These were made by the instructors.

For courses where a book was required, you could check a book out from the reserve and photocopy the whole thing on one of the many high speed photocopiers on campus that all shared a linked card system, so you didn't have to use coins.

I graduated from a US university in 2018 and my favorite math course was taught by a professor who told us at the start that the textbook was just his course notes, which he provided a PDF for, and we were welcome to (and encouraged) use the text as open-notes in our exams so long as we had a printed version of the notes.

The class proceeded to be one of my favorite math classes, and it was so incredible to have a text that was deeply integrated to the course--because it was just straight up what he lectured from. I wish more of my courses had been that way.

There are teachers who care, and then everyone else.

I went to San Jose state university a decade ago. It wasn't unexpected to find that some books could be bought there similarly where you pay for basically a photocopy bound with a spiral binding.

This is how I did my entire CS grad (4 years full time) in Brazil.

Never got a single book.

> Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly.

This really bothers me.

Universities hold themselves up as virtuous. Then students hire them to provide to provide an education. Instead of being agents for the students, the students are instead treated like a captive market. There is a very real conflict of interest in universities profiting off textbooks they "require" while being hired to provide a class. I really don't get how any of this is acceptable.

Then you get required to take an ethics class as part of your degree.

It's complete bullshit

You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?

> So where the FUCK is all that money going?

Please be aware that higher education is a massive dumping ground for the lowest-performing segment of the politically-connected managerial class, who are too cowardly and lazy to run for elected office, and too stupid and impulsive to make it in industry.

Academia is perfect, for them: a gigantic stage for demonstrating moral superiority and hiring friends, with no fundamentals that matter at all.

Totally agree. I only had one professor who had any idea how things work in the industry, and she went back to it within a couple years. I'm not saying there's no value at a university, but most of it is a waste of time and money.

Have just checked financials of one of the providers. It appears that at least 50% of it goes to Sales General and Administrative expenses. Those don’t include educator salaries, buildings, or material. Those are all “admin” expenses.

Oh and another 14% gets invested - buildings and securities.

Middlemen. Our economy has become increasingly more parasitic in all spheres.

I always thought the tech revolution would mean cutting of traditional middlemen

books and libraries and radio and tv and internet will revolutionize education - people said.

It was either a joke or schools and universities have an incredibly tight grip on their market.

Picture what illusive product one can make in those settings. You can have insane prices, the only limit would be what people can afford. The maximum price then becomes maximum debt. While at the same time you can rush out a product that is complete crap, borderline believable but only for the ones who make the relevant decisions.

I see a docu one time about a semi-commercial chinese education formula. Each subject is cut up into tiny modules, seemingly as tiny as possible. One tiny booklet and 1-2 classes. You remember dependency hell? That was it, on steroids. The cert for the module, combined with others did give you access to additional modules and the bundle of coupons eventually turned into a more milestone like diploma but this wasn't the interesting part! You could take a different path after doing a module and become an instructor assistant, become an instructor and then become an instructor assistant instructor! If someone discovered a hard question there was always additional gray matter above you in the food chain.

They had people who could barely bang 2 rocks together TEACHING how to bang the rocks as if the universe revolved around it.

Others build a parkour tightly packed with modules one after the other. If they failed anything they got stuck eventually as you cant do C without A+B

The early adopters of the MLM program had their hands full assisting the teachers teachers teachers. It looked humbling to say the least.

edit: I forgot the part where one could start a business and continue to enjoy the advice from those you paid to teach you and the job offers listing specifically what modules were required.

I don't buy that. Middlemen typically exist to solve some existing market inefficiency, or they exist through corruption and regulatory capture. The latter is a huge problem, but it's not THE problem. Ballooning administration seems to REALLY be the problem all over the place. But... Why is that?

Because there is no competition, and demand has massively outstripped supply. If you want to make money in academic management, you need to build an organization to manage and then justify a high salary to do so. And this is what happens. Huge staffs doing nothing but justifying the boss’ salary have appeared at universities over the past few decades.

Administrators, to stop us academics from doing our jobs too productively.

>That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...

We don't have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes because making those things is not possible, and you can't make impossible things possible by throwing money at them.

And of course this becomes worse if you're using other people's money. If you're throwing your own money at an impossible task, you'll run out (or your investors will run out). If you're collecting the money as taxes and then throwing it at the impossible task, you can waste as much of it as you want. If you're telling people "do this impossible task or I shoot you", you end up doing a lot of shooting and not much teleporting.

You sound like a paid shill for big gravity.

That doesn't seem like a remotely good reason to pay loads of money to administrators in Antigravity Logistical Inclusion Tracking while the PhD students in quantum gravity can't afford rent.

Many big universities are basically hedge funds disguised as schools, these days

Tearing down buildings which millions of dollars were spent on, to put up new buildings which they spend millions of dollars on.

Often the old buildings were not that old at all! They just no longer project the kind of prestige the university thinks is needed to persuade students to enroll.

You basically answered it: it's going to non-teaching administrative staff, facilities/construction, and other random expenses.

Some of the administrative bloat is for regulatory compliance, but most of it seems to be driven by the expansionist tendencies of bureaucratic organizations.

Oddly enough there actually seems to be less administrative/secretarial support for faculty, while student mental health remains a problem that doesn't seem to be addressed adequately.

> Then you get required to take an ethics class as part of your degree

My state university ethics professor published their own book, and required an extra-credit assignment be turned in from a tear out at the end of the book.

I hope this is parody

Sounds like a lesson you will never forget - and you even share it with other people. In a sense, that is a good lesson and a job well done by the professor.

I'm not sure lecturers profit off textbooks. What you are witnessing is more likely indifference and hubris from the academics than a deliberate strategy to extract more money out of students. This doesn't make it less unethical, but unless it's a textbook they themselves authored, it's probably not a conflict of interest.

It’s in the interest of all professors collectively (including those who hope to be real professors someday) to prop up the problematic idea that a book ought to cost $400+ just because it’s a textbook, because professors write textbooks, no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.

> no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.

There is an difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up. Some professors are simply indifferent to their students' plights. As far as these professors are concerned their students are just an inconvenient bleep in their oh-so-important life. Extracting money from them is not on their radar.

The vast majority of professors don't write textbooks. In fact there are probably a lot more profs who do care, and assign open books, or no books at all, than professors who make a living writing textbooks.

> difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up.

Sure, but the only interested parties here presently are:

- students

- publishers

- professors (a few of which "author" or "customize" textbooks and stand to profit)

Students have zero power, publishers have every incentive to increase prices, and most professors don't get involved because like you said, it's not really relevant to them personally.

I agree that if a significant contingent of professors and lecturers essentially started boycotting the "textbook" industry, by using and contributing to "open source" books, or at least authoring or collaborating to author content that they give to their students at no cost, that would amount to applying pressure to the exploitatative business model.

I had a professor mention that they were apathetic to piracy of their own books because they received about a nickel per copy.

> Universities hold themselves up as virtuous.

That's just marketing. For a lot of degrees it's effectively a version of child care for people out of high school. That some people manage to learn something meanwhile almost seems accidental.

I kind of think that 2/3 of university students would be better served to instead do an apprenticeship in the trades. eg: Plumber, electrician, and similar