My Alma mater had a lot of profs who were really concerned about textbook costs. They tried to provide free PDFs as much as possible for course materials instead of books we had to buy.
But then also at this same school is a physics prof who required the exact textbook mentioned in this meme! I still have my copy at home!
As for general tuition cost inflation: that’s a very complex subject. Schools are in competition with one another to attract the best students and generally the most enrolments overall. They spend a lot of money (usually donated by rich families) building new fancy facilities and renovating existing buildings. The new buildings then need a lot of staff to maintain them as well as provide services to both students and faculty.
Over time this has led to a dramatic growth in the size of non-teaching staff at universities (administrative bloat), a major contributor to tuition cost inflation. The other major contributor is the Baumol effect, which has inflated the cost of all human-limited (as opposed to machine-limited) fields. Look at how expensive it is to get a haircut today vs 50 years ago, for example.
My Alma mater had a lot of profs who were really concerned about textbook costs. They tried to provide free PDFs as much as possible for course materials instead of books we had to buy.
But then also at this same school is a physics prof who required the exact textbook mentioned in this meme! I still have my copy at home!
As for general tuition cost inflation: that’s a very complex subject. Schools are in competition with one another to attract the best students and generally the most enrolments overall. They spend a lot of money (usually donated by rich families) building new fancy facilities and renovating existing buildings. The new buildings then need a lot of staff to maintain them as well as provide services to both students and faculty.
Over time this has led to a dramatic growth in the size of non-teaching staff at universities (administrative bloat), a major contributor to tuition cost inflation. The other major contributor is the Baumol effect, which has inflated the cost of all human-limited (as opposed to machine-limited) fields. Look at how expensive it is to get a haircut today vs 50 years ago, for example.