I’m a college professor. I’m very aware of textbook prices. Most students don’t read the textbook anyway, even if its something you want them to read everyday.
For intro classes, I use openstax, which are available free online. For upper-level classes, I try to pick non major publishers, ie not pearson or cengage, with much more reasonably priced books.
My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or chegg…
I went to community college out of high school and dropped out after a year. I went back when I was 35, got my bachelor’s in 2 years, and was the best student in my major and got an award. All I did differently was read the books…
You also had the work/life experience by then to be better able to filter out pertinent information from the material.
Most college textbooks are written in an overly complex manner and require some skill to extract and process the information from them.
So right out of highschool you could have read the textbooks but gotten very little out of them.
Some of that speaks to your maturity and drive too tho. You clearly had a desire to go back, a will to learn, and hopefully a purpose to use that degree you were earning.
At 18 years old, so many people just go to college because its the next step or their parents told them they were. They dont have the passion, maturity, or vision of how their life can be different with a degree
I mean, going back in my 30s school is wwwwwaaaaay easier than the daily adult life struggles. Also, I have ADHD, and a lot of my peers went to college and professional life while I took an extra 10 years to mature. Bbbbbuuuut, a bit of grit and luck I’ve sling shot up to them all thanks to going back to school. It’s not a competition, but going from $25k to $100k correlates to an increase in happiness by climaxing the stress of seeing basic needs.
In Europe we just have scripts for each lecture. Professors may liberally take and modify content from books so you might sometimes wanna check out their sources in a library but you do not need books.
in Germany*
My favorite was when I took Calc 2 and the teacher just told us if we knew someone who took the course in the last 7 years ask if you can get theirs. The new version just deleted 4 chapters and didn’t even change the chapter numbers. It just went something like Chapter 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,13,14,15… brand new price tag though.
Here in the Netherlands we had some teacher who wrote a (small) book on “How to write professionally” and of course that book was mandatory.
I’m a professor who uses OER materials too; I might have bit off more than I can chew this semester since a new class of mine lacks a free textbook and I said, to hell with it, and am curating weekly readings from stuff I can get off EBSCO our campus pays for. So far it’s solid but I didn’t have time to prep it all in advance so it’ll be a wild ride every weekend!
I think I figured out a sneaky solution though; I made an assignment to had students find and report on an article for 5 to 10 minutes of class. They get real practice for grad school and I get crowdsourced sources. Win win!
This guy also found a pretty nice (similar) solution for this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3CY6RR4uns
They basically wrote their own textbook through class assignments, students are co-authors, seems to work great in their case. At least that’s how he presents it.
I’m still a bit unsure how to handle that in my own classes. There are not always suitable OERs or the ones you find come with licensing issues (CC-NC and afaik it’s not clear if you can use them because I do teach for the money).
Thank you for not being one of those professors who writes their own “book” which is 85 pages stapled together that they charge $150 for.
I had one professor who did this but spiralbound for our only course textbook but it was mostly just pulled from other sources and they only charged like $20 for it. It was great. Another one of my professors got in trouble with the on campus print shop because she was sending students there with her personal copy of the textbook to make photocopies of like 50 pages at a time lmao. One thing I appreciated about my school was that our professors seemed generally aware of crazy textbook prices and did what they could to help make it more manageable.
One of my professors wrote a major engineering textbook for his topic. It sucked. I value having a textbook written by someone other than the professor because that way I have a chance of encountering 2 ways to learn the concept.
My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or chegg…
Waiting for the meme, in another five or ten years, when students are bemoaning how the subscription fee to ChatGPT For Grad Students keeps going up.
Hey, Prof! I have a question.
If you were to do things over again, with today’s climate and opportunities, would you pursue the same career? I’m considering going into teaching, but it seems damn near impossible to make a living doing it nowadays. A friend of mine teaches highschool and he makes more than the professors at my school (granted, I go to SNHU online). Any advice?
Different prof here, but a few thoughts:
- academia is not as shiny as it sometimes seems, but it can be great. You can have a lot of freedom to do what you like, work when you like, how you like… do meaningful things. Not always, but the chance is there
- it’s not to get rich. Selling expensive textbooks is rookie level exploitation compared to what people do in the industry, and most of the profit doesn’t even go to the prof
The book to read for this is “the professor is in”. The author takes quite a cynical perspective about academia, but in many ways it’s true. Worth a read (and probably you can get it for cheap second hand)
I will check that book out, thanks!
I’m not concerned with getting rich, I just want to be able to afford to support myself, and potentially a kid one day (though, that’s increasingly unlikely). I’m a full time caregiver for my mom, she’s disabled, and bedridden. So working from home is pretty important. I don’t have any kind of, like, ivory tower aspirations or anything. I don’t imagine I’m going to change the world, or be some oft-quoted academic. Lol. I’d love to teach Anthropology and go on digs some day, but I’m getting an English (creative writing) degree, and I’d love to just have a relatively stable income teach some kids about story structure one day.
Yeah so I could show up to class just to listen to the chucklefuck prof rewrite what I just read and be bored out of my mind
Many people learn better if they both read something and have someone teach it to them in their own words, which is kind of the whole basis of a liberal arts education. Your learning mileage may vary.
I always pirated PDFs of my textbooks, but in the few cases where I couldn’t find anything online (typically when the book is niche and very new), I would always wait until I knew that I actually needed the book, because it was frustrating how often this meme came true.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy, apparently used to contribute to freebsd and postgres, and he went out of his way to find open-source textbooks for all of his classes.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy
I had the bizzaro version of this guy in college once. He sold his own 150$ “textbook” that you had to purchase from a copy shop next to campus. It was just a bunch of sections of other text books that were clearly copied and put together in a tabbed paper folder by the little printing shop.
Was also the same guy that wouldn’t accept assignments unless you turned them in a specific blue folder, which you could conveniently buy from the same copy shop for 5$ a piece.
Still kinda pissed about it like 15 years later, but at least now I can kinda appreciate the hustle that dude had going.
He sold his own 150$ “textbook” that you had to purchase from a copy shop next to campus.
Would have been interesting for the entire class to buy one, take it to another copy shop, and all split the entire cost.
Then, next year, hang out outside the classroom and offer to sell it to people for $20-$50.
Blue folder would be a little tougher….
Break into his home or office the night you submit the assignment and steal all the folders. Steal all from the print shop too. Demand them back the next day or $5 a piece.
I don’t know how long ago that was, but the hustle has long ago counter measured pirating or second handing the books by bundling the new books with a 1 time use code to make a profile into the online part of the course where you have to take tests. You could just buy the code on its own when I was going through this, but the code was like 80% the cost of a code and book.
They also do the thing where questions in the book will be scrambled from edition to edition, so using an older copy of a math book for example won’t track because they’ve arbitrarily changed it just enough.
Well, fuck the professor and or the school on this case. I would have encouraged you to make an official FTC complaint. Too bad that may not be around for much longer.
Not that long ago, I only graduated last year. I’ve definitely noticed the tweaks-between-editions bs, so I always try to match up the isbn. I was also lucky in that I only had to deal with the online course/book bundle for general math courses, most of which I took care of in highschool and were paid for by the school, but yeah I did have to cough up one to two hundred bucks for a few of those.
One of my CS professors was a top contributor to Wikipedia articles on graph algorithms and just told us to read those in lieu of a textbook
One year I was unable to find a textbook to pirate online so I bought a used copy, set up a camera on a tripod, photographed every page and returned it the next day.
Sounds like too much work but the book was worth more than my time to do it.
When I was doing my undergrad, there was this sketchy shop in a nearby alley where they photocopy textbooks and sold them for just a bit more than the cost of the paper and binding. If they didn’t have it, you could borrow it from the library to lend them and they’ll give you a free copy in exchange.
Cheers to one physics professor in university that taught us by his own textbook, but we actually borrowed all the copies we needed from the university library and it was actually relevant the entire course, including exam preparation
We had a prof who said he only used to book for the problems and they changed their order each edition. He would give us the previous years question numbers so we could buy the book used.
My friends and I ended up splitting a single copy of the book and texting each other the homework questions each week.
I had another prof who used an open source book and only charged us the price to print it. You could access it for free in PDF online, or even the source to generate the book in additional formats.
My maths prof wrote his own textbook, we had to buy it but it cost I think £40 new and covered everything we needed for a 3 year physics degree and you could easily find a used copy near campus. Still got my copy somewhere.
I think it was the only textbook I actually needed, all my lecturers wrote their own courses and extra reading tended to be from journals. Only other book I remember using regularly was the CRC Handbook and those were just scattered here and there around the department.
One year we had to buy a “clicker” to give digital answers to multiple choice questions live in class. We only used them a handful of times and then found out we couldn’t resell them after the semester because it was coded to a specific student and couldn’t be changed or something.
I at least appreciated the professor apologizing to us when we reported it to him and promising to not do it to another class when he found out you can’t resell them, but still… I may as well have just thrown $50 in the trash and gotten the same result.
I just create surveys and put a QR code in my slides. They answer the question on their phone.
Yeah, this was 2010…
QR codes were invented in 1994.
QR codes weren’t a big thing at that time and weren’t integrated into the first smart phones, eventually you could download an app to use a QR code. However those weren’t really in use in education settings until closer to 2015.
There’s been a qr code reader app available in the store since 2008. It woulda been doable.
Yeah but most people didn’t have smartphones for a few more years. Making a smartphone required in 2008 would have been insane.
Ok. Valid.
Oh, I didn’t realize they were available on blackberries and the first iPhone.
I remember there was a lot of confusion in the 90s when email was introduced to teachers and late 90s when attendance was inputted into a computer program. Getting a 60 year-old professor to not only use a smart phone, but to utilize them in a lecture when they’ve only used books and a blackboard for the last ~40 years of their career would be difficult. Boomers and Silent Generation had a hard enough time figuring out how to use a TV remote, let alone figuring out how to allow students to access a URL via QR code embedded into a PowerPoint presentation.
At the time, I had a qr reader on my android. You’re right about the teachers though, 100%. Also, not enough students would have had smartphones to be able to actually do that.
Yeah, and Lincoln coulda faxed a samurai.
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Hmm that sounds like a profit making opportunity for a technically inclined person.
It was, they sold the clickers
Oops didn’t mean to! Sowwy I won’t do it again. (Does it again)
The Eindhoven University of Technology?
I remember one class where we literally never cracked open the book. But it was still mandatory to purchase because it had a code to access the online learning tool we had to use for the class.
My anthropology class had us buy four textbooks all written by the professor.
None of them was used at all during class.
I didn’t buy them, or rent them, or spend any money on them. And then I learned to look at the book author while signing up for classes, since the book(s) is/are usually listed.
That’s something I’d want to take to the dean… But then the prof would just use each book ONCE as a workaround.
I worked for a professor like that.
Apparently the guy had complaints like this for years, forcing students to buy HIS BOOKS. ALL OF THEM.
They don’t give a fuck.
It’s a club, and you ain’t in it - George Carlin
This is essentially just stealing from poor college kids. Despicable. I hardly ever bought any media in college (books, CDs, whatever). I spent an incredible amount of time at the school library studying there. I couldn’t afford to buy the books. If a book was mandatory then I had to find a different class to fill that slot.
And it will never be illegal to do that because young people aren’t practically able to be politicians.
Don’t use LibGen.is - it undermines the publishing industry by distributing copyrighted content without permission. It has many text books available for free. This reduces publishers’ ability to pay authors, fund peer review, and invest in quality academic resources. Support legal access options instead.
/s
Wikipedia’s entry on Z-Lib has its Tor address on it as well, so you can avoid that link too. Massive repository of textbooks and indeed books of any kind, all just available for free download. Makes me sick.
Unfortunately those bastards have a more accessible address on the open web that anyone could reasonably use, with or without a VPN to hide their traffic from their ISP. Apparently it’s also listed by Wikipedia. RAPSCALLIONS!
One of my professors, instead of a textbook, created his own wiki-style online resource for the class. Completely free, frequently edited with improvements
One of the best classes I’ve ever taken
Another one picked a textbook that was available online for free through the university’s library =)
One of the first things I learned was to never buy books before the first class.
I had a professor get upset no one had the book on day 1. In her defense, she heavily used the book.
She couldn’t understand that professors would make students a buy a book and never use it.
In another class a student had asked about the book a few days in, the professor’s response was “we have a book?” He inherited the class last minute and didn’t have time to look through all the materials.
That is one busty gentleman.
That’s what I thought!!
My favorite was my cultural geography class (amazing class btw) where the prof told us not to buy the book and handed out 3 ring binders to everyone with the entire book printed out in them😂
Had a similar experience with a grad-level math class where the prof just handed out a sheaf of handwritten mathematical proofs. The class involved reading the proofs out loud and the prof explaining them. Excellent class.
Some professors do the best they are allowed to mitigate the cost of books. Then there was the guy that required his own book for the class and charged tens of thousands of dollars for it.
Oh and the scratch off code inside the book for the online part of the course which is 30 % of your grade… So you need to buy the book because the professors sold out on actual education and are getting a cut of the profit from the publishers.
I’m not exactly college educated, but how is that not an ethical violation? Or is there just no ethics in teaching? If someone prohibits me from pirating textbooks through scratch-offs, my avenues for belligerence are limited.
They promised to teach you how the world works didn’t they? Enjoy your undischargable debt indentured servant!
The US is strange
It’s all very normal when you recognize how much of our institutional structure is corrupted by profit-seeking.
Its no different than a police officer taking a bribe to let you out of a speeding ticket. Or a customs official demanding a kick-back to let a ship unload its cargo. Or a mafia goon shaking down a local storefront for “protection” money. Just institutionalized so there’s no risk of being punished.
It’s no different to…
*Lists things that only happen in third world shitholes 😂
When you look at the statistics on education, Healthcare, poverty etc… in the US you can see which country is the true “third world shithole”.
We are, by strict definition of the term, a first-world shithole.
The third world is simply the set of states that were unaligned during the Cold War. The term took on a secondary implication of poverty largely because of American foreign policy. Failure to implement neoliberal market reforms marked a country out as “poor”, while embrace of those reforms would result in your country being spotlighted as “growing” and its people as “enriched”.
But its all just marketing. While Americans threw billions into the economic sinkhole of Pinochet’s Chile and Park’s Korea and Diem’s Vietnam, countries like Burkina Faso and Yugoslavia and Iraq raced ahead of their peers by triangulating a path between the Great Powers while embracing local economic development instead of fixating on a debt-laden export market expansion.
The yanks and their shitty primary education are the first to claim that their inability to type coherently is “language evolving”
I’ll use “third-world” how I like 😁
Thats because youre an insufferable elitist bore
Abolishing history and etymology make Yanks of us all.
There’s nothing strange about unfettered greed. The only strange part is that it isn’t (technically) a feudal system going along with it.
Professor (who also wrote the textbook): btw you’re using the 30th edition, but were actually on the 31st edition
Me: what’s the difference?
Professor: page 12 is totally different
Somehow a different professor who also wrote their book: btw anybody who needs the book can email me and I’ll print out all 500 pages for you
Unrelated: I had to buy a book for a class that was “edited” by the professor. What does that mean? It’s literally just sections of other books curated by him. We didn’t even use it
This is clearly a very old comic and seriously out of date.
The $400 textbook is a $400 digital textbook now. He needs to have a notebook in front of him so he can read that one paragraph on page 12.
Bandwidth costs for PDF downloads ain’t cheap!
It’s not even a download anymore. It’s a website with the text that runs like dog shit. Oh, and you’re only allowed to read the text for 3 months.
