News-Record.com

Nothing new about this information! Musta been a slow weekend for the letters section.
I overpaid in the early 60's and am still overpaying for text books for my kids. We did get to buy used books if we were lucky and the professor didn't change books from one semester to the other. They were over priced as well.

All incoming freshmen at Va Tech had to purchase computers in 1984. No they weren't laptops, they were IBM PC's, either dual disc or single disc drive, cost, in the range of $1700 to $2200 but they sure didn't get a discount on information or anything else. I didn't hear anyone clamoring for a discount on information then, so why now?

To answer the last question. It's called making money Andrew, or did you miss out on that subject.

Actually the cost of information has gone down. Compare what the freshmen were paying in 84 at Va Tech for computers and what they pay now for a laptop that can be carried from class to class. There is now no need to "wire" an entire campus or entire city as basically was done with Blacksburg and the VA Tech campus at that time. That was not a cheap deal to contract with the telephone company to do the wiring and installation of jacks and run all the wiring to the main frame at the campus engineering department. So the cost of information, or at least the delivery of such has been reduced even if so slightly.

Good idea on decreasing cost to student but it ain't gonna happen.

Don't know if it is still true, but in the 90's when my kids went to Appalachian, the books were free. You just checked them out like a library book. They had to buy a few, but not many. Looks like they could all do that. Go Mountaineers!!!

Technology has changed considerably since 1984 and it is justifiable to ask what higher ed can do to bring down costs, for a whole host of reasons. The fact that 4-year college students are spending $3600 on average for textbooks and community college students using more than 50% of their scholarship money for books is nothing to sneeze at, especially when there are specific steps that all parties could take to alleviate this burden. The main problem is that rising textbook costs are passed on to students without question. There are some pretty serious questions about how publishers strategize to update editions to undercut the secondhand market. Another question is the validity of the "new" information contained in the latest textbook edition. At present, the best that students can do to beat the system is to go online and do comparative shopping, but even so, with prices already fixed at artificially high prices, they're not going to find big breaks on new texts. Some professors opt for older editions that are available at cheaper prices; some don't and could care less. Others have a direct interest in requiring students to buy the latest edition since they are the authors collecting royalties.

The article upon which my original letter was based did not discuss software and hardware requirements, but should have. Higher ed could be advocating free open source software (rather than, say, MS Office) but don't. Negroponte at MIT has been pushing a $100 laptop for developing countries, and it looks like the details are being worked out to hit this price point. It'd make a lot of sense to get this laptop into American campuses. Better yet, educators should think about the direction of technology towards small devices like iPods (now being used at Duke) and mobile phones for information delivery.

There are plenty of ways to reduce the costs of higher ed in America and to make it more accessible and affordable. Most NC students are not at places like Duke, UNC, VA Tech, or ASU, but at community colleges where a few hundred dollars in textbook savings can mean the difference between staying or leaving.