High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students
Here&#x27;s a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.<p>It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market.<p>The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a product(education via tuition) and choices are made for you(textbook selection) that you have to pay for in order to pass the class(see the realization of tuition). That&#x27;s fundamentally broken market mechanics.<p>The folks in charge of making the market decision(which textbook to use) should be the same ones paying for it. We have a term for this pattern - moral hazard, and we shouldn&#x27;t be surprised when students continue the same pattern of behavior when the system continues unchanged.