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Comment by magicfractal | Hacker News Reader

Or let's do it like a bunch of other countries: children have the reaponsability of taking good care of the books and pass them to the next generation at the end of their class. It's a great way of teaching respect for the public good.

A yet better way would be to have these books as open-source and anyone is able to print them at their homes/public livrary/etc.

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> Or let's do it like a bunch of other countries: children have the reaponsability of taking good care of the books and pass them to the next generation at the end of their class. It's a great way of teaching respect for the public good.

This already happens in most primary schools because buying new copies every year is prohibitively expensive.

A classic story in local elections is that books are 20 years old and the system needs a millage to buy new books.

If you assume that a student uses ~10 books a year and that they last 10 years, with $200 books you get grade schools spending about $200 per student per year on books. If it's 20 books and 5 years, it's $800 per student per year.

So while there is probably an obvious opportunity for grade schools to save money on cheaper books, it's also pretty obvious that it isn't the main component of educational spending at that level (the high price scenario puts it at less than 10%).

I think things have gotten worse, but I probably only spent $1500 on books in college (and ~$40,000 on in state tuition). So that's a noticeable fraction, but it wasn't in any way something to worry much over compared to the total costs.

It's not a question of total costs so much as how cheap this would be to fix. The only real issue is text book manufactures like tax software company's have a huge impetus to maintain the current system.

Which is who the government wastes so much money outsourcing in the first place. It's all defused pain for personal gain.

I think the total costs inform how outraged to be. They are probably less than 5%, so if you permanently reduce them by 1/2, you've managed to offset ~1 year of cost inflation. That sort of scenario is not the first thing you address when you look for systematic ways to improve the effectiveness of spending (you of course try do them along the way, but they aren't worth burning much time or political capital on).

Inflation adjusted costs are not going up 2.5% a year. Further, I don't think there are many easy ways to save 2+% of total tuition spending.

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