Resort fee rip offs are nothing compared to college books

It's not even the professor's fault anymore. When I was teaching, the books were mandated to me. New year = new edition. The only difference in the new editions? They rearranged things so that the new edition wouldn't match the syllabus for the old one. Usually no other content was changed. To add more insult to injury, you had school-specific editions with online components and those online components were only accessible through a single-use product key. Only ever made my job more of a pain in the ass, as I had to update things every year for no reason.

 

I was lucky enough to usually get what I needed from the library- you just couldn’t leave with the book so if working on a project you had to take notes or just do it there.

I loved everything about college but it’s definitely a racket in a lot of ways. The most valuable things I learned were never in a classroom.

 

Education inflation,
happens when you freely give 100k+ (guaranteed by the taxpayer)
to an 18 Yr old & no there not buying a house.

Student Loans, the New Debtors Prison.

 

Same here on the peninsula. Unless you're rollin' in scholarship money, there's nothing wrong with getting your AA/AS from an accredited community college and transferring to a public state university as a junior. It's what I did - when dinosaurs ruled the earth - 'cause English 101 is English 101 regardless if you're in an auditorium of 300 or a second floor classroom of 30. If you're gonna cool your jets in the college of business - make a smart business decision early on.

The Mrs. and I have pondered this quite a bit. We never had chu'rens, but as a teacher, she is thumb-on-the-pulse of what post-secondary education costs these days.
And I'm pretty sure our memories and math skills are such that my BS in MIS back in the '90-'94 era probably cost around $6K total. In all honesty, that's pretty good ROI over the course of my IT career.

Today? Whole different ball game.

 

Be careful how freely you dispense that nugget of advice! I graduated in '15 and every class I had that involved an access code, really did require the access code. Maybe one exception-- maybe. But generally you couldn't even turn in your homework without them. Might have just been a quirk of my school or major but I get the sense that my experience is more common than your son's.

 

Some of my lower level humanity and elective classes I got by without buying the text books. I graduated in 2002 and in the early 2000's realized I could possibly take advantage of a little thing called the Internet to find needed information on those general classes. I would also check the library - sometimes they would have a copy of a required book in the MAC circulation of libraries - would help cut costs. But the important classes....yeah those books would set me back 1000's a semester. I still have some of them, never look at them.

 

Just another "nugget" here. Although I didn't think of it or practiced it, I did always notice that there would be a group of fellow students who all had what appeared to be the same "Xeroxed" copy of a text book or three. These guys usually tended to be from the same "social organization" so they were usually much better organized then most college students. Buy one, run off X copies at the frat house copier.

But hey, we could have just chiseled out our own. > chiseled > stone slabs> graduated college in 1977, never had or used a computer and only had a calculator my senior year. SLIDE RULES RULED!

Sorry, got carried away there. I was a geeky engineering major.

 

Judge Smails: The world needs ditch diggers too.

 

Oh, I could go on....
How's about the ART HISTORY book, that cost a small bundle, and then the school wouldn't even buy it back, cause they were getting a "new revision".
Like, exactly what has changed in the last 500 years in Art History??
Every new class covers the same stuff.

Or, making me buy a book, and the instructor doesn't even use it?

Or buying loose leaf bound "books" that the school printed up themselves for pennies?

 

Even 40 years ago they had this thing called a bulletin board (but no one named Craig would help you make up the list) (not sure he was even born) where you could post stuff for sale. A real physical object where you tore off someone's telephone (not cell number, actual telephone#) number and met and bought a used book for more than they would buy them back and less than they sold it used. A win win. Until they "updated" the edition.
You could also get a quick synopsis of the class and professor's attitude. It was all about the attitude dude.

 

When my kids were both at A&M, I bought as many books as I could from "half.com"... when they finished a class, I then listed those same books back on the site, and re-sold most of them. Saved me a ton of expense on books.
That site no longer exists, but Amazon does.

 

I'm glad I'm in grad school and not undergrad. And I'm glad I'm at a school where 80% of the population is already in their careers, so they do their best to tell us how much "book" we'll likely need. And they always make sure there are copies in the library or copies of the necessary chapter(s) on Blackboard (school is brick and mortar or hybrid, but you can't escape Blackboard). And many teachers just assign articles from peer-reviewed journals or give websites. I've had books from teachers, but they tend to not be textbooks in the usual sense, but actual books. Very few textbooks in my field as it's one that's almost all practical application and real-life situations, so I'm lucky in that sense.

 

What's changed is, a lot of "professors" are the author of said textbooks, and they make $$$ by insisting the students by the most up-to-date version. When I finished Grad School 17 years ago, it was the same thing....but not as expensive as now. Don't even get me started on the Buy Back prices the college bookstores will pay you. They're a bad joke. I figured it was worth more to just keep them, and they rest to this day on a shelf in my library.

Ironically, back then, we (my classmates and I) were able to get a few of them on some new website called "Amazon" lol....they primarily were a book seller, before you could get a new kidney from them, like you can now.

 

I always managed to get mine via the dark web or in a pdf version.

International versions are also available granted the pages might be off but still on there somewhere if you can find it lol.

 

You're showing your age using words like Xerox lol.

 

I never attended college. I went into the Navy.

I am sitting here on a wednesday at 1130 am drinking beer. At 56 I am pretty much done with work. I dont have lavish stuff but I also dont have any bills. I do what I want when i want to do it. I like in San Diego too so its not exactly out in the middle of nowhere with a cheap cost of living.

School is not required to be happy. Seems that many people just went and incurred a load of debt and have a regular job for their effort. Not all cases of course, we need doctors and engineers and such.

 

Things have really change in the last 30 years. How many enlisted Navy jobs now require a college education? Those training/career sites are also very expensive. I do agree that many companies now require a college degree where in the past a good bit of common sense was all you really needed.

 

This is an age-old debate fostered again of late as college costs go stratospheric, grads struggle to get jobs and the skilled labor pool shrinks: Are we sending too many kids to college? We have friends with two kids. One breezed through undergrad, went straight into an MBA program -- supposedly folly -- and is now in sports management at a D1 college. The second son was born with a wrench in his hand and tinkering in his soul. He was taking things apart and putting them back together from a tender age and is an age-group record holder in land-speed and did so with his own vehicle. He "had" to go into engineering ... and hated it. It was tough for his MBA and JD parents to come to terms that one kid probably wouldn't get a degree. He left school a few years ago and his doing extremely well.

 

Back in the day. there were times when I got lucky and could check some of the required books out of the library. You know, the stuff that was $100 so you could read two chapters.

I highly suggest getting the ISBN numbers from the books and doing a Google search for used copies. That can lead to some used books that are cheaper than what the local bookstore charges for their used books.

Maybe.However, I get scared over that debate because even if college is not the right path, high school alone is not going to get most people adequate skills for the workforce like it used to. Kids are going to have to do a year or two after college somewhere to get job training for better jobs. I know people want to return more vocational ed programs to HS but I would rather see kids not on the college track get those skills in community college.

 

Yep. You ain't done and prime at 18 ... unless you have massive hoops skills.