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The state of higher education in the United States


Paladin of Ice

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You actually need books to pass your exam? I have many courses where we just read papers, and virtually all other information you need is on the (very extensive) slides.


On the other hand, practically all the books I've bought I actually think were worth the money, especially my applied microeconometrics by Cameron and Trivedi, it's sort of become my bible.


The most expensive one was about 80 euro though I think, and I buy about 5-6 per year maximum.

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Did a 4-year BBA and only bought one book (rookie mistake) for ~€70, copied and shared most others with friends, didn't buy some books at all. Some courses didn't have textbooks, or if they did, they weren't really needed. We did case studies, which the professors would print out for us. We had detailed syllabi, which cost <€10 each, we had detailed presentations that were uploaded to our university page and available digitally any time. Some professors would even lend us their textbooks for us to copy, because they knew overpriced they are - also we often used less-than-a-whole book, so buying it and using 1/3 was absurd.



I actually didn't have a single textbook during my exchange semester in Germany - all the professors had prepared detailed presentations for every part of the course. They would recommend literature if somebody wanted to delve deeper, but everything needed for the exam was covered in the lectures and workshops and available for free digitally.


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I might have skimmed, but I believe the Economist mentioned that the grade average at Harvard was an A- in 2013. Not perhaps pertinent to the ongoing discussion, but relevant to the thread title I would think.

Harvard (and other ivy league schools) is known to have grade inflation issues. Basically, it's almost impossible to get bad grades if you get into the school.

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I didn't have books after my sophomore year at college, except for one in Basic Telecommunications, which covered much more ground than we needed.


That one cost ~40€ and was the most expensive one we needed.


The rest of our books were around 10€, with few going as high as 15-20€.


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With that said, all of the top universities in the US except maybe two (Berkeley and Penn?) are private, though very good public universities (as in, top-50 nationally) exist.

Guess it just depends on the rankings and some are better than others(US News is a joke).

A good many public schools compare favorably however. Multiple UC schools, University of Washington and University of Michigan all come to mind.

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My wife is finishing up a couple classes and starting nursing school next year. She is taking two classes this semester, the cost of books was $465. One of those books was 200 pages of looseleaf paper, like the campus store just printed off a copy of the text. They didn't come in a binder or prepared in any way at all, they just printed it off and put it in plastic wrap. $285.

This is one bubble I can't wait to burst.

Hi awesome possum,

Just a few weeks ago a neighbor was telling me that you can now rent textbooks through Amazon or B&N. You can rent by the chapter and even by the page if you want.

Textbook writing is a big cash cow for professors. IMO there shouldn't even be paper textbooks these days.

I have a 17 year old senior and as much as she wants to go away to school, it's going to be much cheaper to live at home. I'm trying to talk her into community college for 2 years but she's resisting. There's athletic scholarship on the line, too. Even with that and financial aid, she's still looking at around $20K for 4 years. Without it we're talking $80K.

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Sadly, there are actually two types of teachers you might be thinking of. The first is grad student teaching assistants. In theory, these do not actually teach classes -- they are supposed to be helping a professor do it. In practice... well, some professors don't like to teach and the grad students wind up doing the work. The second are adjunct professors who are not actually professors in the sense people usually think of the word, but in fact just people hired to teach a course with no further commitment on part of the university. Both are paid slave wages, though the grad students at least get compensated in tuition. They're not necessarily second-rate teachers though; it's surprising how little having a great deal of extra knowledge (as full professors generally do) correlates with being able to get a small piece of that knowledge across to somebody who doesn't know it.As to the costs, it's a combination of the free market and the government interacting in the worst possible way. The government makes it so that it is easy to get student loans without having any idea of how one would pay them off and these same loans are generally not dischargeable in bankruptcy like practically all other loans in the US. Add the fact that the people getting these loans are at the midpoint between childhood and adulthood and... well, this is basically the dream of lending agencies come true. Given all this money, colleges then compete for students in expensive and completely unnecessary ways -- it's free market competition all right, just in a very unnatural set of circumstances.The bureaucracy and administrative bloat is another combination of the government and the market acting in concert. On the one hand, the government mandates compliance with a long list of regulations as a condition for federal aid qualification (without which it is basically impossible to do research). On the other hand, colleges again compete to provide a variety of student services. Both are well and good... but somebody has to pay for them.

Hi Altherion,

It depends on where you go and what class it is. I went to a big research school (Pitt)and I had several classes where you saw the professor maybe once through the semester. The grad students and doctoral students taught the classes. PhD's aren't there to teach. They're there to bring in grant money.

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Textbooks are a "cash cow" for the tiny percentage of college professors who manage to get one published. The great majority of us have never written a textbook and don't have the time and/or ability to do so.



I teach at a "non-selective" university where very few of the students come from wealthy or even upper middle class families. Yet very few of my students choose to buy e-versions of textbooks. They still seem to prefer paper despite the expense.


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Textbooks are a "cash cow" for the tiny percentage of college professors who manage to get one published. The great majority of us have never written a textbook and don't have the time and/or ability to do so.

I teach at a "non-selective" university where very few of the students come from wealthy or even upper middle class families. Yet very few of my students choose to buy e-versions of textbooks. They still seem to prefer paper despite the expense.

Paper is easier to use in every way except for:

- searching the contents

- carrying the damn things around

That said, my experience is that most people these days just hit up a torrent site or something and download a scanned version of all their textbooks (or the ones they can).

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Textbooks are a "cash cow" for the tiny percentage of college professors who manage to get one published. The great majority of us have never written a textbook and don't have the time and/or ability to do so.

I teach at a "non-selective" university where very few of the students come from wealthy or even upper middle class families. Yet very few of my students choose to buy e-versions of textbooks. They still seem to prefer paper despite the expense.

What I hated was that if they changed one word they'd issue a new edition. And trying to sell them back was a ripoff too.
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What I hated was that if they changed one word they'd issue a new edition. And trying to sell them back was a ripoff too.

Frequent edition changes are more the fault of publishers than authors.

However, it's also the case that in the sciences and social sciences, some students themselves complain if the copyright on the text is more than five years old. They want the books to include recent research in their field.

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Frequent edition changes are more the fault of publishers than authors.

However, it's also the case that in the sciences and social sciences, some students themselves complain if the copyright on the text is more than five years old. They want the books to include recent research in their field.

Well, sure. In some fields it's not necessary, though.

Students are a captive audience. Most of the time they have no choice but to bite the bullet and buy them in whatever format.

Or maybe I just went to school at a time when people paid cash and didn't get a lot of aid. Books ate up a big chunk of the budget.

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When I was in law school our textbooks for each class cost $200 - $250 per book. Most full time students take 5 classes a semester so figure at least $2,000 a year for textbooks if you buy them new.

And most of the time for 2 credit classes you get through 1/4 of the textbook. What a waste of money! This is why for the law classes I teach now I don't use a textbook. Through our law school library there is a series of law books available online that contain the same information the textbooks would that they can all download, save as PDF, print, etc. for free. And then they can download the assigned cases and statues for free as well.

It was rather bizarre going from having to pay thousands of dollars for textbooks as a student to getting showered with them by the publishers for free. Even though I don't assign a textbook, the publishers still send them to me every year...every single textbook for the subjects I teach every single year. It's like no wonder they charge the students so much for them, they have to cover the costs for all the comp copies they send out.

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Re: textbooks

I don't think every student needs every textbook in every class. In many cases the textbook is indeed non-essential and can be ignored.

However, I would think that for all students, there are a few key textbooks in their respective field of study that would be great books to keep around. I still use my cell biology, biochemistry, molecular genetics, and statistics textbooks from undergrad days once in a while.

Looking around at my colleagues, all of us are immensely aware of the burden of textbook fees on out students, and our school already offers textbook rental.

Also, as Ormind said, a very low percent of all professors write books, and fewer of those write textbooks, and fewer of those still write textbooks that are widely used. For my General Biology class, I have about 9 options to choose from. That's it. That's 9 sets of authors (so about 60 professors) writing books for use for introductory microbiology, which is pre-requisite for nursing, one of the popular majors. Most scholarly outputs are not intended for consumption for undergraduate level work so when professors do publish books, typically they are in highly specialized area of expertise and maybe the graduate level work will require it.

So while I understand the griping about textbook costs and the changes in editions, and I am sympathetic to it, I think that's probably less of a factor over all in influencing the quality of higher education.

As to doing some classes in community colleges, I think that's a good idea, but with this caveat: don't do a full 2 yrs there. Do 3 semesters and then transfer.

Here's why.

If you finish all your general education classes in community colleges, you will only have classes for majors left to do at the 4 year institution. This means that your first semester will be 2 to 3 classes in your major field of study in the 2000 to 3000 level. That is a very steep transition for many students.

Obviously a lot of factors go into determining the success of the transition, and many of our transfer students do extremely well. However, I also have plenty of students who attended community colleges that do not have high demands on their students and they struggle very hard to catch up to speed. Another problem is that for sciences, many community colleges do not offer a laboratory component to their classes and many transfer students are severely lacking in basic lab skills when they arrive. We end up making them take courses at the lower level to learn the appropriate lab skills.

I want to state that I do not think 4 year colleges are automatically more rigorous than 2 year community colleges. Many CCs have excellent standards that surpass many 4 year schools. But if the plan is to transfer from CC to a 4 yr institution, the student should really look into the catch up curve between the two and be prepared well for it when the time comes.

Finally, a second caveat is to work with the transfer counselor at both the CC and the intended 4yr (if you already know) to make sure you will receive full credits for the courses taken at the CC. In our department there are many courses that we do not accept transfer credits for when they differ from ours in terms of lacking a lab component, for instance.

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Hi awesome possum,

Just a few weeks ago a neighbor was telling me that you can now rent textbooks through Amazon or B&N. You can rent by the chapter and even by the page if you want.

Textbook writing is a big cash cow for professors. IMO there shouldn't even be paper textbooks these days.

I have a 17 year old senior and as much as she wants to go away to school, it's going to be much cheaper to live at home. I'm trying to talk her into community college for 2 years but she's resisting. There's athletic scholarship on the line, too. Even with that and financial aid, she's still looking at around $20K for 4 years. Without it we're talking $80K.

$20,000 for four years is worth it, that's only $5000 a year in loans which is very manageable. I don't see why you'd pick community college when the cost is that low. And if you ditch the scholarship and do two years of community college instead it sounds like the final two years would cost $40,000, so your plan would cost more money.
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