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.
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 $50 in the trash and gotten the same result.
I just create surveys and put a QR code in my slides. They answer the question on their phone.
Hmm that sounds like a profit making opportunity for a technically inclined person.
It was, they sold the clickers
I always pirated PDFs of my textbooks, but in the few cases where I couldn’t find anything online (typically when the book is niche and very new), I would always wait until I knew that I actually needed the book, because it was frustrating how often this meme came true.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy, apparently used to contribute to freebsd and postgres, and he went out of his way to find open-source textbooks for all of his classes.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy
I had the bizzaro version of this guy in college once. He sold his own 150$ “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….
One of the first things I learned was to never buy books before the first class.
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…
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?
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!
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.
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.
in Germany*
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…
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 lick 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
And it will never be illegal to do that because young people aren’t practically able to be politicians.
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 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 =)
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.
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 😁
Abolishing history and etymology make Yanks of us all.
Had a professor in a freshman physics class tell us during a study hall that the best way to learn physics is to go into the library and pull down all the various copies of all the different physics books you could find on the shelves and just do problems in the books until you got the hang of a particular kind of scenario being tested on.
The fact that you’re getting charged $400 for a textbook is bullshit. But the idea that you’re in a class on a given subject and you just don’t need to bother reading the material in advance of the lecture is also bullshit.
While this is fairly common for what is literally used in class, the intent is generally for the student to read and study the rest of the text that gives additional context beyond what is covered in class. An opportunity to learn in addition to the required work.
Most teachers do not do a very good job of conveying this.
The intent is to extract money from vulnerable young people, which is why they change the problem sets every year without changing the educational content.
That is the intent of the publishers when they change frequently. If the teacher/professor gets a cut then they might share the same incentive to update regularly.
But at the core from a teaching perspective, the general reason for assigning books that might only have a portion used in class is because the teacher thinks the book as a whole will be helpful in understanding the content. Otherwise they would just recreate their own version of that chunk of information if they aren’t getting a cut from sales.
In later years I gave up on buying textbooks entirely. On the rare cases that the book actually mattered I just took the hit to my grade and made it up elsewhere. I don’t think it ever cost me more than half a letter grade in the long run.
College textbooks are like the old games where they asked you to look something up in the manual to unlock all the features.
Does this happen worldwide or only certain courses?
I don’t remember having to buy any textbooks in university for my CS course.
