Popular thoughts on my mind... and in my public journal:

On College Text Books

Note to reader: I could go on and on- this was mostly a stream of consciousness on the topic. Some day I'll organize these ideas into a proper, concise, essay.

I find it amazing how the university system in the United States is fundamentally built to provide as little service to the students as possible. In many cases, the system is actually made to press students against the wall (financially, among other ways) harder than ever.

Take text books, for example. I was able to buy the text books for my classes (I'm a first-year part-time MBA student @ CUNY Baruch) at literally a 50% discount (as compared with the price of the Used book, at Baruch's bookstore)by buying them Used, online, at Amazon and Half (they were available at other sites as well). I had a similar experience during my last year at NYU ('99/'00) when the Internet was really popular by then.

I fully appreciate the argument I have heard - which is supposed to justify why text books cost so much. In short:

"Because so few people actually buy each text book - only students, for specific classes, and only for a short time, till the next edition must be released. And often its the professors who write the books, and need to make money, so there's a whole conflict of interest (in terms of who decides which books students need for a specific class). As such, it costs a lot of money to print a small number of books, so each book becomes relatively expensive. Similarly, the resale cost of the book is relatively high, because of the number of people it takes, working at the college book store, who are involved in receiving the book, inventorying it, re-stocking it, and then selling it. As such, used books are cheaper, but still relatively expensive."

My answer to this quandry - DON'T PRINT THE BOOK in the first place! I'll get back to this issue in a minute, since the immediate problem facing students is that books cost a lot of money, and all schools aren't switching to e-books tomorrow. How do we reduce the cost of college text books today?

It makes perfect sense to me that universities need to make some sort of joint venture that works with Amazon, half.com and other book vendors online (or make their own service) where its essentially a huge booksale for students. Professors can submit their book list to the school, which will make it available to all these sites, so the students can know for sure they are buying the book their teacher said they need.

This system would help chip away at a terribly annoying aspect of graduating college - the deluge of junkmail from your almamater, literally begging for money. The school will save money by not needing such a huge book store and staff (which I'm sure looses money) and will provide a source of revenue.

The college book store will eventually be obsolete if they don't do something like this. Most students I know don't buy their books at the bookstore, new or used, because of the cost. Just think of the number of people employed at these schools stocking shelves!

Back to the issue of e-books... I can't believe the schools haven't led the charge in making all their text books e-books. How many classes require bringing the book to class (not many)? While having a computer is as necessary in college as having a pencil. And if you have a computer, you will be able to have access to the e-book- which can be loaded with way more features than any book could ever have (ie - weblinks,etc...). Besides this, as I've pointed out, text books are very costly to produce. Why force students, who are already being asked to pay what I consider userous fees to get higher education (we're only hurting our own future by making higher education unattainable for most of our young population) to buy books that shouldn't have been produced in the future? They're high priced handouts that teachers would otherwise provide.
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Interesting story - I had a professor once from Israel who was so appauled by the cost of text books, that he asked each student to chip in $25, and he made sure to make photocopies of all the material we needed for his class.
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Furthermore, all books in the future will be e-books, and printing on paper will be a thing of the past. Colleges should be pro-active in preparing the leaders of tomorrow by getting them used to reading and researching on the computer, rather than wasting their time flipping pages in a book.

Lastly, the environmental impact will be huge. Just consider the number of books printed each year. Besides trees cut down, there's the bleaching process of the paper which is harmful to the environment, as are the ink - and the kicker is the amount of pollution create by all the trucks delivering these books to the bookstores.

This entry was posted on Jan 21, 2004 at 1/21/2004 04:28:00 PM.

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Today I went to a lecture (hosted by the New York Times) where a truly amazing man, Dean Kamen, spoke. My friend Bill had two tickets, but couldn't go because he's a great dad, so he gave them to Lon, who invited me. Thanks Bill & Lon!

For those of you who don't know, Dean is the guy who's company invented the Segway. My friend Lon suggests that if you're interested in the Segway, you may be able to find more information at Amazon's Segway store.

Anyway, while Dean and his company, Deka Research have made unbelieveable inventions geared towards healthcare, what really struck me is Dean's philosophy on education. He said several times how silly it is that our schools and our country in general, will do whatever it takes to ensure our sports teams are #1 in the world - while it seems as though the fact that we are 19th in education is tolerable. He had a very important point - the problem isn't a lack of money/resources, or as he put it "supply" - we commit more money to education that any other country. He said the problem is "demand"- students aren't absorbing information. As such, he decided to do something about it, and ten years ago he founded a project called FIRST, which I suggest you read about (I'm considering volunteering with them). With regard to FIRST, he made some very important points:

1. He decided to organize FIRST and administer it as if it was a sport - so as to energize students to get excited about the projects. He pointed out that its difficult to excite students about a science project being done individually in the basement of the school when they see all the fanfare dedicated to athletics.

2. He made the program "team" based, to help students learn to work together. This point was the most poignant to me.

I've read many books on management, as well as autobiographies (most recently, "JACK Straight from the Gut" - which I highly recommend), and one of the things that Jack Welsh, as well as others point out over and over is that team-work is one of the most important virtues to make an organization successful. That said, I don't remember many times in school where we as students were genuinely encouraged to practice team work. More often than not, it was about individual success, and "beating" the other guy. Dean Kamen mentioned that in school, working together was often called cheating - which is a stretch to some extents, but not always.

In a conversation a little while ago with Bill, he mentioned that it would be great if people in organizations could all acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses, and all work together - even if that meant that some work in the mail room and others be the top-dogs, but as we know, that rarely, if ever, happens.

I believe that while there are many things wrong with our educational system here in the U.S.,

This entry was posted on Jan 11, 2004 at 1/11/2004 07:14:00 PM. There are . If you want, you can leave your own response by clicking here. You may also send this post to a friend of yours via email, or bookmark it for yourself by using icons below;

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