High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students
Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.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.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's fundamentally broken market mechanics.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't be surprised when students continue the same pattern of behavior when the system continues unchanged.