http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susa...
$264.39, for students that work part time jobs at $7.00 an hour (before taxes).
Not only students are angry about this. Professors are angry, and authors are angry too. Bitter fights between professors and publishers are common.
Everybody wants to see the big players in this industry fail. Please, someone, make it happen.
Cost of attendance at my state flagship is $24,000. Full time at minimum wage is $15,080. Any education worth that kind of money is hard enough that you physically can't work full time while doing it. Student labor is pretty miniscule as a source of funding.
In other words, $264.39 is not actually 37 hours at McDonalds. It's a rounding error on a parent's 6-figure contribution over 4 years. Or a rounding error in your monthly loan payment when you're making $50k instead of $8k. Or it's coming out of interest on the school's endowment if the school is good enough and your family poor enough. Or it's coming from whoever funds your scholarship if you are one of the handful of people smart enough to get a merit-based full ride. Etc.
(No, your experience of putting yourself through a state flagship in the 80s is not relevant. Minimum wage is roughly what it was; tuition is decidedly not.)
I believe the textbook publishing industry could adapt (or be disrupted) to be more cost-efficient, but you would first have to vastly reconfigure the higher education system such that it's reasonable for students to pay their own way. Then you'd actually have incentives to price things for students.
You talk about full-time classes and a full-time job. Actually some of my classmates are raising children or that sort of thing as well. But beyond that, you're correct that it is hard to take a hard STEM major full-time and also work full-time. It would be almost impossible to maintain a 4.0 or 3.9 or whatnot. The solution is obvious, don't take a full course load - take three classes a semester, or perhaps two, or perhaps one. It takes longer, but what is the alternative for those who can't afford full-time study?
If some 18 year old can't really afford full-time study...then don't do full-time study. Why make your parents shell out thousands they can't afford, as well as burdening yourself with enormous loans, for something you may very well not complete in four years. Some kids graduate and are not working - a lot nowadays. On this public school commuter campus, the smarter half of the CS major seniors I know have never heard of software version control, have no idea what git, Perforce, cvs etc. is. Most of our professors are good too - most of them understand their topics, and some are even good at explaining it. A dedicated person can get a lot out of the education, and then perhaps go get a Masters at a more prestigious school afterward if they want.
If people can't afford fulltime, don't go fulltime. Maybe the government should help more, maybe not, but if someone can't pay fulltime they should go parttime.
I don't really understand how they can afford tuition + room + board but need the $140 (less taxes) a week, but as it turns out this is very common.
It made a big impression on me when a student walked in to turn in his homework wearing a Chick-Fil-A cap. Asking around, I learned that this is typical at the university where I teach.
So, yes, here at least, $264.39 is 37 hours at McDonalds. Well.... taxes.... so make that more like 50.
As a student, maybe I can shed a little light on this. There are a few reasons working part-time at minimum wage can make economic sense for a student.
At least at my institution, few kids whose parents foot the tuition bill work.
The students most likely to be working 20 hours/week are the same students likely to receive some form of financial aid/merit scholarship. As such, the tuition + room + board costs may be significantly less than the sticker price. Considering this reduced expense, the ~$200/week from part-time work may make a considerable contribution to a student's budget.
Even if these students aren't able to completely cover the remaining cost of school not covered by financial aid, there are many instances where that part-time job replaces a potentially high interest student loan, reducing the overall cost of education in the long run.
In some instances, even students whose parents assist them with educational expenses require a part-time job for discretionary expenditures. I have more than one friend whose parents pay tuition, but do not cover the cost of gasoline/car repairs necessary for the student to go to class.
I also worked 40-50 hours per week during the summer. Between that and loan distributions, I could just barely keep up with my typical costs. If anything went wrong--e.g., an injury (yep!), car repairs (yep!), fines (yep!)--the credit card debt didn't get paid off.
You might predict that I would graduate with a lot of debt. You would be right. In spite of having a merit scholarship for full tuition and $4500/year, I had over $35,000 in student loans and another $5000-10,000 in credit card debt when I graduated.
The right place to target reform would be professors. They should take a stand to write and use only open textbooks that can be freely downloaded and distributed. This is already common at the research level, but it doesn't seem as common for intro textbooks.
Studies have shown that text is not the ideal format for novices to learn a subject for the first time.
I'm a co-founder at https://www.clutchprep.com and that's what we're tackling. Students go to 300+ student classrooms, don't learn much and then have to rely on a $250 textbook to teach themselves (doesn't work well for most). It's a broken system.
Edit: fixed the link
As a recent graduate I remember shelling out thousands of dollars during my undergrad years to pay for textbooks. It was always a crapshoot because you never knew if the professor would not use the textbook at all or would heavily rely on it and assign reading/problems from the book.
There are definitely ways around purchasing expensive textbooks, but most are illegal, and none are convenient or guaranteed.
Here's an open source Java book on Penflip: https://www.penflip.com/lynnlangit/tkp-lesson-plans
http://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php
Free online, <$10 in print. There is a high school level stats text book available as well. Its also not "crowd sourced", but the results seem solid.
Listen, Uber is an example: Not playing by the rules makes it easier to win and when you do a few will complain about your lack of ethics but only a tiny fraction will make that count against you.
JustFab? You may be upset about dark patterns but people love them. Apple, Google, et. al. intentionally breaking the law? No one cares, people still want to work for them. Intel's illegal anti-competition activities? Microsoft's? People still love them.
No one cares about the guy who worked his ass off so he could afford a book, if that work cut into the time needed to study, leaving him less educated. People celebrate the guy who, having pirated books, was able to concentrate on learning and has the free time to become better at many other things.
But please oh please disrupt textbooks for schools. Parents are forced to buy new books every year because of social pressure. After all, you wouldn't want your kid to be known in class as "the one with parents too poor to even buy a textbook" and bullied for it. Not that adults would care about someone having a copied book - but the kids do. Recognition and respect of their classmates is of paramount importance to every kid in the school; publishers know this and they can charge whatever they like, and parents have to pay.
The big problem I'm facing right now is how to subvert universities requiring super specific and customized versions of their textbooks. I think the solution is a crowdsourced list of textbook alternatives (ie: "your university says you need Biology Harvard Custom Edition, but that book is the same as Biology minus chapters 6 and 11. You can get the generic edition for $11").
That's really just a bandaid, though. A real solution would look something like https://www.boundless.com/ or Khan Academy.
Obviously the books changed slightly. But they kept change lists, so you always knew if you had the latest info or not. Sometimes, even the lecturers did this. E.g. "If you have ed4, it's on page 400-403, otherwise it's page 389-392 on the latest edition, etc".
Some useful discussion here, including indications that cheaper options exist: http://suburbdad.blogspot.ca/2014/08/oer-erps-and-idea.html
Maybe what's required is a company that a) publishes cheap (probably older) textbooks, and b) rouses student organizations to push for their adoption.
Part b) is by far the harder one, and probably doesn't have a technical solution. It's a marketing/consciousness-raising thing.
Really takes open access (which is great, but still expensive) to the next level. Very inexpensive publishing, and free preprints.
If anyone is interesting in this domain and would like to chat, please ping me. I'm in SF Bay Area, email is in my HN profile.