For the overwhelming majority of students, tuition is not paid out of pocket. It's paid with loans. They see it as an investment towards a career which will allow them to pay back those loans. For many, the weight of their debt does not sink in until well after college. Meanwhile, textbooks are an immediate cost with an immediate impact on a student's financial situation.

I attended university in the early 2010s. After my freshman year I stopped buying textbooks for most classes. More than just their cost, I found that most textbooks really were optional. Most professors never even referenced them throughout the course. I figured I could always buy a book later if I found out I needed it, but that never happened. The few books I actually did buy after my freshman year were all mistakes. I have not read any of them and I had no trouble with their associated classes.

It sounds like the professor who wrote this article actually incorporates the course material he assigns. Good for him. But in my experience that is quite rare.

The best was when you could download the book and share a PDF with the class. Fuck the textbook industry, it's extortionate.

I would, however, be thrilled to find a $35 text. The average cost of my upper division textbooks was closer to $200 each. Some courses would assign multiple books.

> More than just their cost, I found that most textbooks really were optional. Most professors never even referenced them throughout the course.

Imho that’s what makes the textbook overpriced: the usefulness in the course. In my academic years i’ve seen some textbook that are actually pleasant to read and that you could actually rely on, alone, to pass the course… and then so many books that where completely useless: either more of a reference than anything else or some poorly written text by the same professor holding the course.

At some point I resorted to ligben first, and then bookstore later and only if the book did deliver some actual value.

> For the overwhelming majority of students, tuition is not paid out of pocket. It's paid with loans. They see it as an investment towards a career which will allow them to pay back those loans. For many, the weight of their debt does not sink in until well after college. Meanwhile, textbooks are an immediate cost with an immediate impact on a student's financial situation.

Textbooks can equally well be paid for with college loans, they aren't restricted to tuition-only.

> Textbooks can equally well be paid for with college loans, they aren't restricted to tuition-only.

Making the financial problem with study costs in the USA even worse, more cash to buy textbooks from credit means higher prices that can be extracted for the books, just like any other good which is mostly paid through easily achievable loans.

Because it is an additional expense and fairly often you don't actually need it. You are paying a lot of money for that one chapter you will maybe have to read and whose content you can likely find elsewhere.

Plus, the idea that everyone should buy it is bonkers. There are or should be libraries in school that costs $10k a year. Or at least, there should be used book from last year or rhat one book 5 friends bought together. All these would be financially reasonable decisions.