…"Students recognize that textbooks are essential to their education but have been pushed to the breaking point by skyrocketing costs," said Rich Williams, a higher-education advocate with the group, known as U.S. PIRG….
Meanwhile, the New York Times is holding one of its “debates”:
• Do We Spend Too Much on Education?
Americans are spending more and more on education, but the resulting credentials — a high-school diploma and college degrees — seem to be losing value in the labor market…. See the debate
2 comments:
The problem I've observed is that many a college bookstore is, unlike the college it's connected to, a for-profit business. Whereas community and state colleges try (however successfully or un-) to make education affordable, the bookstore is driven by a profit motive. Strange bedfellows.
Re spending too much on education, I still think that college degrees have deep value without them having to be justified by eventual salary, class position (lower, middle, etc), job title, etc. Sure, in a bad economy, we look at the pragmatic cost-benefit analysis of everything. But this analysis often leaves out the value of a college education that cannot be expressed in terms of salary, job, earnings, status in society, etc. However, a student has to ask oneself if it's worth the debt.... The article brings up a vicious circle that's going on in education & society.
At the two colleges of the SOCCCD--and in many colleges--student government is funded in large part by a "tax" placed upon textbooks. That is, the funding mechanism for student government helps raise the cost of texts.
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