Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
Last year, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities unveiled a new program that gave out $150 to any and every full-time post-secondary student in Ontario who applied for it, no strings attached. More than half a million students province-wide qualified for the Technology and Textbook Grant, or TTG, intended to help cover the "added academic expense related to textbooks and technology and other academic supplies," as John Milloy, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, told the Queen's Journal last year.
"We felt $150 was a complimentary amount for some of these upfront costs people have," Miloy told the Journal. "It is available to all students regardless of their financial circumstances." When attending university keeps getting more and more expensive and less and less fair, the TTG was a very nice—albeit very small—thing for the government to do.
Too bad, then, that this year they've very quietly rolled it back. Now, unlike before, students have "to apply for and qualify for a Canada-Ontario Integrated Student Loan" (so: OSAP) to be considered eligible. Ineligible students who try to apply now receive a message online informing them that: "The ministry has no record of a processed OSAP application from you for the 2009-2010 academic year to date. To be considered for TTG, you must apply for full-time OSAP assistance."
The argument could be made, of course, that those students who receive OSAP are those most in financial need. But that ignores the large segment of the student-going population with financial needs that don't line up with OSAP's own definition of the term, as well as those students with financial needs who would prefer to not take out a government loan to cover their costs. There are few students who couldn't benefit from $150—and this year, even fewer of them will have the chance to.
The Ministry would not return our requests for comment.
David Topping is a full-time student at the University of Toronto.
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I also remember reading they were going to increase the amount to $300 when fully implemented. Shame.
You don't have to take a government loan to apply for one. And even if you are only granted $300 of OSAP (which I was in my undergrad) you would still qualify for the free money.
I remember this $150 last year. It seemed fairly clear to me that it was a way for the gov't to make an 'announcement' with big $$, though they knew full well that not everyone would apply and would actually cost them much less than in the 'announcement.'
I was glad to have $150 (who isn't!?) but I felt there were better ways to use this money. Like, if my department was given $150 per student to spend on books for our shared library.
A bit off topic, but I've never understood why student loans and scholarships (e.g. OGS, SSHRC) aren't paid out until the end of September. During my many years in university, it was common for students to be totally broke when school started with barely enough money to eat - and yet we're all supposed to be buying books right away.
Since that's not enough for the first year engineering calculus text ($183.85), the amount was always a bit of an insult and a de facto subsidy for academic publishers. Students are still driven to stealing. For math and the sciences especially, the ministry would do better to require universities to develop cheap or free course material.
Agree that textbooks are a shameless cash grab, but *many* university students -- who in the article are described by one copy shop owner as "eating spaghetti every night", which sounds boring and annoying, but definitely doesn't describe a lethal level of poverty -- are not "driven" to stealing. Theft is still a choice.
Many of the students I know who photocopy texts don't do it because they're on their last dollar, but because they didn't manage their money well or because they're just cheap.
I'm definitely one of the cheap ones, but I can freely admit I might not totally understand. The most expensive text I ever bought was $130 for an art history book (which yeah, I paid for ... I was angry, but even angrier when I realized it was totally useless for the course), and by my last years, all my text needs cost only dollars, not hundreds. Lucky, I guess.
Anyway, I like your idea. There's no reason why private industry should have so much control over what should be an entirely public domain.
They have got to do something to make school more affordable. I don't know how students are expected to survive when paying for school books that just keep getting more expensive, while feeding themselves at the same time.
The elephant in the room that I'm shocked nobody ever does anything about is the textbooks themselves. College textbook publishers have been raping students since time began.
183$ for a calculus textbook? That is f*king outrageous.
Professors often pick their textbook based on which drunken jackass textbook rep wines and dines them the best or takes them to the best strip joints. I had a roommate who sold textbooks and he loved his job - went back and forth from Montreal to Windsor getting drunk every step of the way with professors. Some profs barely gave the book a look over - they just loved being treated like the king by Wes the textbook guy so they picked his textbooks.
All textbooks should be online and students should pay a reasonable one time userfee that covers ALL their courses. They should be able to download a pdf of each chapter. And the publishers should be a lot less greedy.
How do I get me some textbook-vendor booze and strippers? Because, as a professor myself, apparently I'm missing out big time. As is basically every other professor I know. All I get -- and all I have ever heard of anyone getting -- is a free copy of the book.
Perhaps your friend is exaggerating?
This was back in the early 90's. Maybe the hammer has come down.
Perks aside, why not write a free textbook?
Writing a textbook is a hell of a lot of work, and the skills to write a good one are rare. Why should they be free?
Because you feel the profits largely accrue to the wrong people.
Because you believe it shouldn't be necessary for the government to hand your taxes out as textbook grants.
Because you feel education should be affordable and accessible, and high book prices (convoluted intellectual property arguments aside) do not promote this.
Because you're confident you can do a better job than others, and welcome the scrutiny.
Because you want a wider audience for your work.
Your argument #1 implies that profits should accrue to the right people (e.g., the author), so is actually an argument against free textbooks (no cost, no profit). Your arguments #2 and #3 are against high textbook prices, a position with which I am sympathetic, but not in favor of free textbooks per se. Your arguments #4, and #5 are independent of the price of the textbook, so have nothing to do with free textbooks.
Also, I like how you started this discussion by arguing that the economic value of writing a textbook should be zero, and now you're wondering why people aren't falling all over themselves to write free textbooks. Well, maybe I have more lucrative things to do with my time?
I did? I said they should be free to students. I'd be entirely happy if "develop cheap or free course material," from my first comment above, turns out to mean "pay authors to write course material that will be cheap or free for students."
A similar misunderstanding is behind the inability of some to grasp why and how high-quality free software is made. IBM, Red Hat and other companies pay Linux kernel developers (the kernel is free to everyone) and charge only for support ("user education").
Anyway, if you're going to toss in 'economic' but not acknowledge a connection between price and volume (my #5), this discussion won't be going anywhere.
Well, however you imagine your ideal world, you started out in this thread asking me why I don't write a free textbook. Your subsequent responses indicate that you are aware that it's not part of my job to do so. Thus, you do indeed value my time in writing the textbook at zero.
Linux kernel development is sufficiently different from textbook writing as to be incomparable. In particular, Linux development is collaborative, while textbook writing is solitary; in textbook authorship, there would be no sharing in the effort to go along with sharing in the benefits. Even so, it's interesting that you should bring up the "support contract" model for Linux. As a former Linux and current Mac user, I would argue that this model introduces perverse incentives, because there's no value in making the system intuitively usable -- which is probably why Linux has made very little progress in personal computing, and why it's still frustrating for desktop users. By analogy, I should obfuscate my free textbook so that people will register for my class and hear me explain the material, since it's registration that pays the bills.
Your comment about price versus volume indicates a misunderstanding of the textbook market. The "wider audience" I'm seeking is other professors, who generally don't have to pay for textbooks (we either expense them to grants, or get free evaluation copies). Indeed, now that I think about it, the "wider audience" argument supports the current model. I already post course notes to my website for free, yet nobody pays attention to these. On the other hand, if I packaged my notes as a textbook and they were picked up by a major publisher, that publisher would spend a lot of money marketing my textbook to professors, making them aware of it -- and possibly inducing them to read it -- in ways that simply posting it to the web would not. Not to mention the prestige of having a textbook accepted by a major publisher, which automatically increases a researcher's profile and might open the door to having the book stocked in libraries.
I'm still waiting for a coherent argument as to why textbooks should be free (as opposed to less expensive).
CBC's Spark just did an interview with Eric Frank, a guy who founded a company that publishes open-source textbooks. It's worth a listen.
Yeah, my dad was a prof - dean for a while - and I don't recall him ever coming home wasted with stains on his pants and an armful of textbooks.
Conversely, as a recent Ryerson Radio & TV grad, I was not on OSAP (thanks, mom!) and bought very few textbooks yet still received the textbook grant. In my case, our fourth-year thesis projects were largely independent and very costly, so my team rolled the textbook money back into school projects in a different way.
The texts don't have to be free.
The Universities could integrate text costs into course fees, to provide a more transparent cost-of-course price structure. The universities would do bulk orders and you get your texts at registration. It would radically impact the stores that sell textbooks at the moment, but since they would no longer require a margin to stock the books and handle cash the net cost to the student should reduce - especially given the impending move to e-texts. It would also eliminate piracy since what's the point in pirating a mandatory text you already paid for?
Agreed that texts don't have to be free, and probably shouldn't be; but there's no reason for them to be as expensive as they are. My idea is the following: if a professor requires a texbook (or set of textbooks) exceeding X dollars (for some suitably small value X), they should have to provide reasons in writing to the dean.
This idea has several things going for it:
- It's a subtle change, which has a reasonable chance of being adopted
- It forces professors to pay attention to the cost of books (which right now they don't)
- If expensive books are needed for some reason, they can still be required
- Since professors famously hate paperwork, it would introduce a downward pressure on the price of textbooks: a publisher with a book below the threshold of X dollars could use that as a selling point