Textbook costs are the straw that broke the camel’s back for many students who thought that they had successfully budgeted their education. The big widely used textbooks in required courses are real cash cows.

The obsoleting of math textbooks with new editions every 3 years or so is especially reprehensible. The first year of calculus has been stable for God knows how many decades. (Special applications of calculus, e.g. for engineering, are taught with different textbooks.)

This strikes me as the market for ebook readers. Don’t focus on NYT bestseller titles, or Amazons subpar Kindle. Go after student textbook market. With a ‘good’ reader and a workable proprietary scheme, the student could load up his reader with the recommended titles every semester for perhaps a third or a quarter of the current cost, and the publishers would still make a profit. Plus, the dead-tree introductory books are heavy. We weighed our 13-year-old daughter’s rather intimidating looking backpack at the beginning of the fall semester and the thing weighed almost fifty pounds. A good reader would certainly weigh less than a tenth that. And would bulk far less as well.

Econ is the worst case by far, because while econ textbooks are indeed updated regularly in order to maximize return, and while economics is in fact changing (the way calculus isn’t), the new textbook editions do not introduce the new ideas in economics.

(Sources: Coyle, “The Soulful Science”; Rosser, Holt, and Colander, “The Changing Face of Economics”. These two books estimate that it takes 20 years or so for new ideas to reach the advanced undergrad level, and anywhere from 40 years to forever for them to to filter down to the “Principles” level.)

Contrast what happens in genuinely scientific, non-ideological sciences whose PhDs don’t consult for banks, for example biology. From time to time P.Z. Meyers will mention adapting his undergrad lesson plan to take an exciting just-published paper into account.

I’m sympathetic to Slocum for once here, as I am one of the rare liberals with doubts about Education.

Now, I’ll agree with you in the main about introductory-level books, especially the math ones, as I have some familiarity with them.

But.

While the math may be stable, the pedagogy most definitely isn’t. You may disagree with the necessity, but math people are constantly looking for better ways to teach the subject. Myself, I tend to the theory that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. But I’m open to the notion that there are better ways to teach the subject, and … not so good ways.

The whole idea of required reading is bogus. Recommended reading, fine. But why should a student be required to read, let alone to own, a particular text?

I’m guessing it comes down to an assumption of responsibility in an easy, standardized way. I don’t know how many times I’ve had a student come up to me after the test complaining that I didn’t teach some specific point that they were being tested on. I can haul out my lesson plans and show that, yes, this specific point was covered, and have them say that it’s not in their notes for that day, and that I must have skipped it.

Or I can simply assign reading, and then point out in the text (that they should have read) where the material concerning the question I asked is located.

This is important, especially, I have found, in the lower-level classes: for some reason parents are very apt to leap to their kids defence at this stage, and the name of the game with the administration is documentation, documentation, documentation. You’ve got that, and they (my superiors, at least) will back you to the hilt. You don’t have that, and in the name of ‘good relations’, they’ll make a big show of ‘correcting’ this injustice, forcing you to let the kid take the test over, and in some cases, going so far as to drop a nasty little note into your file. With said parents watching as you’re forced to sign off on the damn thing.

Probably the second, possibly the fourth. Those courses will give high grades to fewer students, but the high-graded students will have shown the ability and motivation to find any necessary supporting texts for themselves, and to use them in a self-directed fashion. Whereas a high grade on the first course simply indicates an ability to open one’s mouth as each spoonful of pap approaches.

For some courses, especially at a higher level, there are very few if any textbooks, or there is a single text which defines the subject matter. On those cases, one can reasonably expect students to read those particular texts. J.P.Serre’s Linear Representation of Finite Groups is the first example which comes to mind from my own long-ago first degree. But one can learn introductory economics from hundreds of different sources.

Well, I guess if he really needs a new Prada suit and Brunori loafers, it would be worth it.

Far be from me to seek to disabuse a student of it’s ignorance. And the good Lord knows most students don’t read what is required anyway.

But I will put your case to a test.

I will teach a course, say, in chemistry by requiring students to read a standard chemistry textbook. I will compare test results with a chemistry class where students were not required to read a chemistry textbook. I will then compare the test results of both of these with chemistry courses where students are required to read book on kitchen remodeling and another in which students are given the option or urged to read about kitchen remodeling or any title they wish documenting the fate of pre-dreadnought battleships.

Which one of these would you like to see as a tax accountant?

Yes, I understand that required reading makes the course easier to teach. In fact, it removes much of the need to teach, because the student can learn the material from the textbook, do exercises set by the textbook, make notes on the textbook instead of your lectures, revise from the textbook, get angry and confused at the textbook, and have her misconceptions set straight by the textbook.

She can even fall asleep over the textbook instead of in your lecture.

So can we deduce that required reading is a tool used by lazy academics to shirk their responsibilities?

So one of your thoughts on this subject was what Slocum would have to say about it? Excellent.

You have it backwards (understandably).

Students go buy books, tell parents how much it was, get reimbursed. Plenty of my fellow students did this when I was an undergraduate.

Of course, they could have bought cheaper books and then lied about the cost to get more money for beer. But that’s kind of irrelevant, because they could also buy new books and then lie about the cost to get more money for beer.

But what really needs to be measured and certified is what specialists know and know how to do, not what accredited courses they paid for and sat through (or mostly didn’t bother to show up for except for exam days).

My wife is in medicine, and I know for a fact there are some real clowns practicing out there—I am not reassured by the fact they graduated from medical school sometime way back when.

Imagine if universities were in the education business but not the credentialing business and had to justify themselves by being the most cost-effective way to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to pass the certification exams (which the universities did not administer or control). Wouldn’t that be fun?

Yes, that is indeed the utility maximizing response, and admittedly it might have had something to do with me searching out old editions in the library. But for most students it actually works more like having an account. In my experience, usually the parents buy the student a “plan” which includes daily meals and purchases at the book store. The number of daily meals is fixed though you can vary their quality somewhat, but there really isn’t much of a margin there. So the real trade off isn’t “more beer” vs. “new textbook” but something like “new textbook vs. more ball point pens”.
Of course there’s a principal-agent problem here(parents can’t trust students not to blow their allowance on beer rather than textbooks) which the college/bookstore is exploiting, since ostensibly these “plans” are supposed to be a way of limiting your offspring’s expanses (which they might, but the side effect is that they create a captive consumer base and create monopoly power, so net effect could go either way). In fact I knew a guy in college who would offer something like 60 cents on the dollar for students with a “plan” to buy his textbooks. They’d get cash (more beer), less ball point pens, and he’d get a 40% discount on his books. And he never had trouble finding takers.

So yeah. The hypothetical situation you describe is not all that hypothetical.

(And, add to your list the cost of Art History books, some of mine 30 years ago were near $100). And no, not all students have big piles of money laying around, to effortlessly spend on royalty producing texts.
Once again, directing back to the issue—even if they did, the point is the rent-seeking behavior of the prof/author.

The comment that economics teaching is training its students in a specific political theory sounds spot on; there is a distinct ladder-pulling-up theme there, and if the hoi polloi can’t afford the text, it is a way to weed them out and they don’t ever know that it’s personal.

There is a weak reflection of this behavior going on where I am; our local farmers market after 30 years & a lot of growth voted in a board—and the board members immediately decided to drop their own fees by a huge amount, raise them on the small fry vendors, and said at first it was because they needed the money for operation, when pressed finally owned up to wanting to give themselves a discount, and felt the newbies should pay for it, because they felt there’s too much competition now.
You might be tempted to say that they had some kind of point if they were founders or long time workers (as above: authors of definitive texts) but these folks aren’t either. They’re just in a position to extract money from others.