E.g. If I shop for plane tickets and I see a flight advertised for, say, 92 EUR I know that the price includes all taxes (sales taxes and airport taxes). Credit-card processing fees are (I think) no longer permitted.
It's not a perfect system - there are still the 'optional' extras (hold-bags, seat-bookings, insurance) extras on top of the price (and sometimes dark patterns to make you pay for them).
In a related matter, in the UK (not sure about the EU) there are advertising regulations which cover 'from' prices. I believe here if you advertise a price as 'from XXX' (e.g. 'flights to Berlin from 50 GBP') then at least 10% of the inventory needs to be available at that price. So no having a single seat on a 150 seat plane available at an artificially low price.
The US "DOT requires airlines and travel agencies that display ticket prices to advertise the total price that a consumer must pay to purchase a ticket. Wherever an airfare is advertised, such as on a website, in an email, or during the booking process, the fare price must include all applicable government taxes and fees, and any mandatory carrier-imposed surcharges." Furthermore, if you're buying a ticket with an US segment 7 days or more from departure directly from an airline, the airline must typically "allow passengers to cancel their reservation within 24 hours and receive a full refund without a penalty."* This is something not afforded to customers on an intra-Europe flight.
https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
*They can also offer a 24 hour hold free of charge, but the only airline that I know of that opts for this still allows the 24 hour cancel even after the hold.
Price of Attending an Undergraduate Institution - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cua
(summary per state) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_330.20.a...
(by year) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_320.asp
It should be made easier to find, but its not particularly hard to find.
https://financialaid.wisc.edu/cost-of-attendance/
> Your cost of attendance (COA) is an ESTIMATE of the expenses you might encounter while attending UW-Madison. Your COA includes more than just tuition and fees – see below. Most programs’ COAs are based on a full-time, nine-month enrollment period, unless otherwise noted. Although the actual cost of attending UW-Madison varies depending on your particular spending habits, the university bases your financial aid on your estimated COA.
I'm an auditory learner who only ever used the books when there were homework problems out of them. I saved a ton of money in college by getting good at guessing which types of classes/professors would actually require the book, and I would not have appreciated seeing the books bundled with tuition.
There needs to be a minimum amount of content that has materially changed in order to call it a new edition. Moving questions around and adding a word here or there is not cool.
I went back to college in the early 2010s. Even then it wasn't uncommon for a text book to come with a license code for an online learning module that was both required for classwork and non-transferable.
So yes, I could share the book, buy a used copy, or rip a PDF from an ebook, but that doesn't get me into the online class module that my professor is requiring for class, because that's hosted by the textbook's publisher and I don't get access unless I buy the book new.
I took some vehicle repair courses as electives and there was an online module despite the majority of class time being spent in a shop environment doing actual work on vehicles.
It was ridiculous.
But the main reason why the idea would help is that colleges set tuition based on what they think the market will bear. The actual cost of the books though would be the school’s problem. Administration might actually pressure professors to NOT use custom self-authored editions that cost $200 more. Also, if the books are included, the school would want to buy used ones from any students who didn’t want to keep them, since it would save the school money. So they would be incentivized to tell professors to not switch to the yearly “new edition” which just resizes a few callout boxes each chapter in order to screw up the pagination, and randomly shuffles the exercises.
* note: I’m imagining here that tuition is set to a fixed amount for everyone just as it is today, not that everyone’s tuition is computed custom for them to include the books their particular professors picked.
It's kind of like meal plans: when I went to college, meal plans were priced horribly, but you were forced to pay for at least a base meal plan, even if you lived off campus. It was just another way for the college to make money off of students who had no other choice. When meal plan prices rose $100 in a single year, or the college eliminated the previous cheapest meal plan, it's not like any students are going to transfer over a couple hundred dollars a semester. But it still sucked. Seems to me like bundling doesn't solve issues, it just reduces transparency and results in more "hidden fees" that might not show up in standard tuition costs.