One Final Shot: The Textbook Industry Wants to Live!

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Students who choose Cengage’s rental option will get immediate access to the first chapter of the book electronically, in e-book format, and will have a choice of shipping options for the printed book. When the rental term — 60, 90 or 130 days — is over, students can either return the textbook or buy it.

With the growing competition from online used-book sales, digital texts and new Internet textbook-rental businesses like Chegg and BookRenter, other publishers and college bookstores are also edging toward rentals.

Textbook Publisher to Rent to College Students TAMAR LEWIN, August 13, 2009

I worked at a university for several years that was, as far as I know, the only university with a textbook rental program. I was always surprised at how few professors supported the idea, despite the fact that we were rapidly making an four-year college degree either too expensive or a decades long debt burden. This isn’t a myth.

One reason the online school I work at now is so successful is that it manages to cut the cost of education nearly in half. That’s nothing to sneeze at in any market, much less in the deepest recession since the great depression. One of the dirty little secrets of certain cadres in academia is that they believe restricting access (via testing or finances or both) makes their jobs easier.

Many professors insist that, particularly when it comes to writing, students should have the skills they need before they enter the door. If they don’t, these professors complain bitterly. A minority work hard to improve the public schools. But far too few believe in the democratic mission of an educated society. Too many accept the hierarchies created by the cultural capital of a college degree.

Textbook publishing can be monetarily tempting, too, especially when professors usually come out of school with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I don’t think that rentals will save the textbook industry, though. Who wants to use a technology that is so expensive to update when alternatives are available? Their days are numbered. Open source is the future, sooner or later.

Posted in: Writing

History Repeated, this Time as Farce

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“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”-Margaret Thatcher.

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable and they are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation or they will bankrupt us.

Health Care Reform, by John Mackey, August 14, 2009

I am not sure what to think about John Mackey, health-food billionaire, starting his piece with a quote from Margaret Thatcher. Either he is utterly ignorant of Thatcher’s violent regime or he means to call up an image of her reactionary politics, a kind of mindless mean-spiritedness, as the guiding spirit of his vision of the future. Who needs enemies if this is our friend?

I remember Mackey’s Whole Foods Market from its earliest days in Austin, Texas. Mackey’s genius, if you want to call it that, was to privatize the ideas of the local food cooperatives. The best known of these coops was Wheatsville Coop. (It still exists.) What Mackey did was to remove the democratic structures of these coops and replace them with individual greed.

Even more cleverly, he used the dietary philosophy of the coops as a kind of combination smoke-screen/ rationalization for this personal aggrandizement. He wasn’t just getting rich, he was helping to build a better world. Mackey was and is a master of this sort of new age euphemism. Like Wal-Mart, he doesn’t hire ’employees’ he hires ‘team members.’ He gets rich; ‘team members don’t need unions.’

Mackey rehearses all of his long-standing themes here, too, especially the notion that government should just get out of the way and let the health care industry fix itself. He also repeats the myths of shortages and long lines supposedly attributable to socialized medicine. I think anyone interested in education ought to pay close attention to this kind of argument.

It’s not just a good teaching moment for talking about the way market ideas become market fanaticism, and the way market fanatics often feel the need to falsify information in order to defend the indefensible. It’s also an good example of the arguments we will surely see as we try to defend the public school system against continued privatization. It’s just not funny anymore.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places

Education Costs: Pot, Meet Kettle

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In today’s tough economy, more people are questioning why colleges cost so much. Many blame administrative bloat and inefficiency. Over the past 20 years, as enrollment has grown by 40 percent, the number of support-staff members on campuses has doubled, according to a report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

But we must place higher education in context. It’s important to recognize that growth in support staff compared with enrollment reflects a set of natural responses to shocks that are broadly affecting many other industries as well.

As defined in the center’s report, “support staff” comprises many job categories. Two of the important ones are computer specialists and workers in business and financial operations. Both types of employees occupy an increasingly important role in colleges and in the economy as a whole. They also represent highly educated workers.

College Administrations Are Too Bloated? Compared With What?, Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman

I don’t want to pretend that I know these guys’ work; I don’t. They apparently have a book coming out about college costs, and it’s hard to be critical before the book’s done. But when someone seems to try to justify the rising costs of education by comparing it to the rising cost of dentistry, red flags go up.

On the other hand, the comparison may be apt in ways not explored in this piece (and potentially explored in the book). One reason, for example, that public health care systems are cheaper is that they don’t have so many administrative costs. And one of the most important of those administrative costs are the high salaries of administrators.

I think the authors are right to suggest that at least some of the rising costs of education has to do with all of the new things we expect education to do. Like medicine (and presumably dentistry) technology is driving up the costs. Like medicine, too, if we keep letting the costs of education rise, we will pay an enormous price. I don’ think education costs have to keep rising.

Like private health care, I think the salaries of administrators and, too often, academic stars, are absurdly inflated. Too often, universities now work as public funded research wings for all sorts of industries. The costs of education, like the costs of medical care, are marbled throughout the system, and it’ll take trimming to get it out. I hope the books shows us how.

Posted in: Economics, Writing