>A new copy of the textbook for Intermediate Accounting II sells for $373.25, but the same book can be rented for the semester for $149.30. Students can write on and highlight rented books. The bookstore also sells cheaper electronic copies.
My community college did this 25 years ago. Though they "sold" us used books at a huge discount, and then paid us a portion of that when we sold them back. In the end, it was basically a "rental" but if you screwed up the book, you didn't get as much for it.
The ridiculous part is that accounting II is a course taken by a huge number of students. This isn't a small run problem.
The actual solution to all this is to have universities pay for books. They can shop more diligently, roll their own, use out of date books, go digital... Lots of options that are open to the college, but not the student.
When the decision maker is not the user, price systems fail.
That's exactly how they do it in public schools before college: the school buys the book and you get to use it for the duration of the course. Oh, and you have to get a book cover (in some districts) to protect it from damage.
The private college my wife did her masters at some 5-6 years ago also did the same thing. Some of her teachers just produced their own material for the students and ran off that instead of overpriced books.
The public university I went to had some teachers like that. It also had some who produced their own material and made you buy it from the university bookstore.
$200 for spiral bound 1/2" thick pile of black and white paper that's "totally different" from the one my roommate bought last semester? Ugh.
Most do, but textbook publishers caught on, which is why they released a new edition every couple years: it forced the next students to buy new books. The student at the end of the chain ended up with a worthless book (which he may have had to buy new if there were not enough used books to go around as was often the case)
Obviously textbook problems are not of a world shaking scale. But, this is so obviously a case of market gone badly. Reshuffling chapters in in order to make books unusable is not an economically useful (in the abstract sense) activity. Price systems are known to do weird things when the person doing the buying is prescribed a shopping list by another person, whether in a bookstore, pharmacy or prison.
Where the hell are all the universities' economists?!
If a university's compost was horribly buggy in some way, there would be overqualified ganderers all over it, out of curiosity if nothing else. The bookstore problem is even an interesting one, and a useful one to solve.
It may be more insidious than it seems too. Universities are (I assume) going to be changing the way they teach in the coming years of decades. The way schools use technology to teach is important, and doing a decent job at this is important. One approach to figuring it out (that I hear is well underway) is letting individual lecturers use stuff from the open market. Ie, prescribing to students. Ie, the same problem.
I actually think it's not a bad idea letting students buys stuff a la carte^, even bid for lab tutor time or pay for weekly exams. Universities do too much prescribing anyway, but at least if they prescribe they should pay. I think if economists need to prove their salt. Fix this and then we'll have a little more confidence in your idea about global insurance reform or whatnot.
^Obviously not in a way that just means students pay more or leverage wealth competitively.
> Where the hell are all the universities' economists?!
Authoring textbooks. It's now in fashion to create campus-specific editions of textbooks (in partnership with some professor, of course) who then gets royalties from sales... to the students that they mandated purchase this specific book.
My community college did this 25 years ago. Though they "sold" us used books at a huge discount, and then paid us a portion of that when we sold them back. In the end, it was basically a "rental" but if you screwed up the book, you didn't get as much for it.