I’m a college professor. I’m very aware of textbook prices. Most students don’t read the textbook anyway, even if its something you want them to read everyday.
For intro classes, I use openstax, which are available free online. For upper-level classes, I try to pick non major publishers, ie not pearson or cengage, with much more reasonably priced books.
My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or chegg…
I went to community college out of high school and dropped out after a year. I went back when I was 35, got my bachelor’s in 2 years, and was the best student in my major and got an award. All I did differently was read the books…
Some of that speaks to your maturity and drive too tho. You clearly had a desire to go back, a will to learn, and hopefully a purpose to use that degree you were earning.
At 18 years old, so many people just go to college because its the next step or their parents told them they were. They dont have the passion, maturity, or vision of how their life can be different with a degree
I mean, going back in my 30s school is wwwwwaaaaay easier than the daily adult life struggles. Also, I have ADHD, and a lot of my peers went to college and professional life while I took an extra 10 years to mature. Bbbbbuuuut, a bit of grit and luck I’ve sling shot up to them all thanks to going back to school. It’s not a competition, but going from $25k to $100k correlates to an increase in happiness by climaxing the stress of seeing basic needs.
In Europe we just have scripts for each lecture. Professors may liberally take and modify content from books so you might sometimes wanna check out their sources in a library but you do not need books.
in Germany*
Here in the Netherlands we had some teacher who wrote a (small) book on “How to write professionally” and of course that book was mandatory.
My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or chegg…
Waiting for the meme, in another five or ten years, when students are bemoaning how the subscription fee to ChatGPT For Grad Students keeps going up.
Hey, Prof! I have a question.
If you were to do things over again, with today’s climate and opportunities, would you pursue the same career? I’m considering going into teaching, but it seems damn near impossible to make a living doing it nowadays. A friend of mine teaches highschool and he makes more than the professors at my school (granted, I go to SNHU online). Any advice?
Different prof here, but a few thoughts:
- academia is not as shiny as it sometimes seems, but it can be great. You can have a lot of freedom to do what you like, work when you like, how you like… do meaningful things. Not always, but the chance is there
- it’s not to get rich. Selling expensive textbooks is rookie level exploitation compared to what people do in the industry, and most of the profit doesn’t even go to the prof
The book to read for this is “the professor is in”. The author takes quite a cynical perspective about academia, but in many ways it’s true. Worth a read (and probably you can get it for cheap second hand)
I will check that book out, thanks!
I’m not concerned with getting rich, I just want to be able to afford to support myself, and potentially a kid one day (though, that’s increasingly unlikely). I’m a full time caregiver for my mom, she’s disabled, and bedridden. So working from home is pretty important. I don’t have any kind of, like, ivory tower aspirations or anything. I don’t imagine I’m going to change the world, or be some oft-quoted academic. Lol. I’d love to teach Anthropology and go on digs some day, but I’m getting an English (creative writing) degree, and I’d love to just have a relatively stable income teach some kids about story structure one day.
I always pirated PDFs of my textbooks, but in the few cases where I couldn’t find anything online (typically when the book is niche and very new), I would always wait until I knew that I actually needed the book, because it was frustrating how often this meme came true.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy, apparently used to contribute to freebsd and postgres, and he went out of his way to find open-source textbooks for all of his classes.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy
I had the bizzaro version of this guy in college once. He sold his own 150$ “textbook” that you had to purchase from a copy shop next to campus. It was just a bunch of sections of other text books that were clearly copied and put together in a tabbed paper folder by the little printing shop.
Was also the same guy that wouldn’t accept assignments unless you turned them in a specific blue folder, which you could conveniently buy from the same copy shop for 5$ a piece.
Still kinda pissed about it like 15 years later, but at least now I can kinda appreciate the hustle that dude had going.
One of my CS professors was a top contributor to Wikipedia articles on graph algorithms and just told us to read those in lieu of a textbook
One year I was unable to find a textbook to pirate online so I bought a used copy, set up a camera on a tripod, photographed every page and returned it the next day.
Sounds like too much work but the book was worth more than my time to do it.
When I was doing my undergrad, there was this sketchy shop in a nearby alley where they photocopy textbooks and sold them for just a bit more than the cost of the paper and binding. If they didn’t have it, you could borrow it from the library to lend them and they’ll give you a free copy in exchange.
One year we had to buy a “clicker” to give digital answers to multiple choice questions live in class. We only used them a handful of times and then found out we couldn’t resell them after the semester because it was coded to a specific student and couldn’t be changed or something.
I at least appreciated the professor apologizing to us when we reported it to him and promising to not do it to another class when he found out you can’t resell them, but still… I may as well have just thrown $50 in the trash and gotten the same result.
I just create surveys and put a QR code in my slides. They answer the question on their phone.
Yeah, this was 2010…
QR codes were invented in 1994.
Hmm that sounds like a profit making opportunity for a technically inclined person.
Oops didn’t mean to! Sowwy I won’t do it again. (Does it again)
Cheers to one physics professor in university that taught us by his own textbook, but we actually borrowed all the copies we needed from the university library and it was actually relevant the entire course, including exam preparation
My maths prof wrote his own textbook, we had to buy it but it cost I think £40 new and covered everything we needed for a 3 year physics degree and you could easily find a used copy near campus. Still got my copy somewhere.
I think it was the only textbook I actually needed, all my lecturers wrote their own courses and extra reading tended to be from journals. Only other book I remember using regularly was the CRC Handbook and those were just scattered here and there around the department.
I remember one class where we literally never cracked open the book. But it was still mandatory to purchase because it had a code to access the online learning tool we had to use for the class.
My anthropology class had us buy four textbooks all written by the professor.
None of them was used at all during class.
I didn’t buy them, or rent them, or spend any money on them. And then I learned to look at the book author while signing up for classes, since the book(s) is/are usually listed.
That’s something I’d want to take to the dean… But then the prof would just use each book ONCE as a workaround.
I worked for a professor like that.
Apparently the guy had complaints like this for years, forcing students to buy HIS BOOKS. ALL OF THEM.
They don’t give a fuck.
One of my professors, instead of a textbook, created his own wiki-style online resource for the class. Completely free, frequently edited with improvements
One of the best classes I’ve ever taken
Another one picked a textbook that was available online for free through the university’s library =)
My favorite was my cultural geography class (amazing class btw) where the prof told us not to buy the book and handed out 3 ring binders to everyone with the entire book printed out in them😂
Had a similar experience with a grad-level math class where the prof just handed out a sheaf of handwritten mathematical proofs. The class involved reading the proofs out loud and the prof explaining them. Excellent class.
That is one busty gentleman.
That’s what I thought!!
The US is strange
It’s all very normal when you recognize how much of our institutional structure is corrupted by profit-seeking.
Its no different than a police officer taking a bribe to let you out of a speeding ticket. Or a customs official demanding a kick-back to let a ship unload its cargo. Or a mafia goon shaking down a local storefront for “protection” money. Just institutionalized so there’s no risk of being punished.
It’s no different to…
*Lists things that only happen in third world shitholes 😂
When you look at the statistics on education, Healthcare, poverty etc… in the US you can see which country is the true “third world shithole”.
We are, by strict definition of the term, a first-world shithole.
The third world is simply the set of states that were unaligned during the Cold War. The term took on a secondary implication of poverty largely because of American foreign policy. Failure to implement neoliberal market reforms marked a country out as “poor”, while embrace of those reforms would result in your country being spotlighted as “growing” and its people as “enriched”.
But its all just marketing. While Americans threw billions into the economic sinkhole of Pinochet’s Chile and Park’s Korea and Diem’s Vietnam, countries like Burkina Faso and Yugoslavia and Iraq raced ahead of their peers by triangulating a path between the Great Powers while embracing local economic development instead of fixating on a debt-laden export market expansion.
The yanks and their shitty primary education are the first to claim that their inability to type coherently is “language evolving”
I’ll use “third-world” how I like 😁
Abolishing history and etymology make Yanks of us all.
Thats because youre an insufferable elitist bore
One of the first things I learned was to never buy books before the first class.
They promised to teach you how the world works didn’t they? Enjoy your undischargable debt indentured servant!
