re: College Texbook Prices have gone up 1,041% since 1977

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The webassign stuff irks me more than the books. Teacher is too lazy to review your homework, so I'll charge him an extra 75 bucks and have a computer do it. "But there are 500 people in your math class, there's no way a teacher can grade all that homework

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College professors shouldn't be "grading" homework in the first place. College students are supposed to be big girls and boys. Go to class, pay attention, complete your assignments, pass the exams. Somewhere in this process the student should be mature enough to figure out if they aren't "getting" something and seek help on their own initiative.
Too many students don't belong in a four year college to begin with. In order to accommodate these students, processes and content are being watered down. And as a result, the actual value of four years of college education decreases as the cost increases.

ETA: if you have a professor over the age of 35, they probably hate online homework as much as the students. When it first came out, most professors balked, and wouldn't use it. Around 2005, colleges began to require it in order to satisfy vague Dept of Ed mandates. An earlier poster called out the DoE as the root of much of this BS - spot on...

Yeah it's a hell of a rip off. You end up using maybe a quarter of the book and then they stick useless software inside that you never end up using. Then you get maybe $20 back when you sell it back.

Hell - that's over 38 years - it felt like textbooks went up that much just from 1985 to 1993.

I assumed all college textbooks were available in digital form these days. You people can't find nerds on campus that can hack that stuff for you?

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With that being said, many of my undergrad and grad professors did not recommend reading the book for more than reference purposes. Interesting, I found that reading my organic chemistry textbook was the most useful.

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Oh you absolutely need a textbook in some classes.

Sometimes it takes the students too long into a semester to realize this.

I took a Maymester course at South Carolina where the professor assigned a book he had co-authored. The book came with a CD that loaded a program we had to use in order to submit assignments. Overall cost for the book was $480. By the second day of class, 2/3rds of the 120 students (including myself) withdrew from the class because there was no way we were paying that in order to take a class for 4 weeks.

Later came to find out the professor was making over 20% in royalties from sales of the book, which is well above the average for the author of an academic book. I've never been particularly keen on complaining about the overall cost of an education, but that instance was just a pure money-grubbing sham. Felt bad for all the students who fell for it.

Can anyone else think of a product that an outside agency imposes a mandate to purchase, thus driving up demand while the suppliers are limited? Obamacare will see price increases due to the same forces at work.