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Comment by Tangurena2 | Hacker News Reader

$10k is a trivial amount when compared to the amount of loans current students end up with. At many public universities, it amounts to a single semester.

Community colleges used to be free - fully subsidized by taxpayers. Until Reagan. As California stopped funding vocational education and community colleges, other states followed along.

Making student loans exempt from discharge in bankruptcy has been a massive subsidy to the financial markets. With a guaranteed source of income (from loans to students), universities have raised rates far faster than inflation. Even the textbook companies don't care about prices - pricing for American textbooks is outrageously high.

No one cares. Until Biden advocates for some tiny relief for students - then everyone complains. It is like some parody of the Trolley Problem: "debt relief is a betrayal of all the people who the trolly has already run over!"

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i think this is one area where price caps actually make sense: college text books and college tuitions. Just make it illegal for public colleges to charge more than a certain amount.

as for text books, we need to encourage professors to reuse the same text book for at least 5 or 10 years. that will increase the resale value of the books. or better yet, have universities rent out books at some minor fee that they can recoup over 10 years.

That kind of policy around textbook reuse doesn’t work well. Information is changing and teaching from 10 year old textbooks is the same situation public schools have (though, their challenges come from underfunding).

For some fields, use open source resources would likely work better and embrace the living nature of that particular field. For others, I think setting price ceilings or allowing schools/governments to negotiate pricing (similar to the new Medicare drug negotiation) would work better in keeping the price of textbooks down.

Calculus (and even calculus pedagogy) hasn't meaningfully changed in the past decade. You can still teach students the basics of chemistry or art history with an older book. Yes, some classes like genetics, epidemiology, and c++ teach content that's been completely reinvented in that time, but the majority of 100-200 level classes could easily use older books rather than requiring Pearson's latest edition.

Why not just make some publicly funded text books and mandate that they must be used in any publicly funded institution.

CCs are still free or nearly free in almost every state. In CA, 50% of CC students pay 0 while the rest pay around $550 per semester which is nearly free.

California CC tuition is not representative of the rest of the country.

In-state tuition for a full-time (15 credits) student at Salt Lake Community College is currently ~2100 per semester. At Denver Community College, ~3000 per semester.

That seems "nearly free" from our perspective in the tech industry, but when I was a young adult making $13/hr it was a challenge.

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