edmeis3
Filing Flight Plan
First time I ran into this was an avionics-addict prof who occasionally posts here. Not sure what ****ed me off more, getting ripped off to feed his addiction or that I wasn't in on it.
College Textbook Scam!
- Thread starter ARFlyer
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Drake the Outlaw
Here in Georgia, we have a State sponsored lottery which benefits the education system. Kindergarden through college.
This has had several unintended consequences;
- Colleges have spent money like sailors on leave. Tuition and everything else has gone up exponentially.
- Grade inflation in both High School and College to allow more students to obtain and/or maintain their lottery funded tuition payments.
- This has resulted in a lot more kids getting "free" tuition than the program is capable of sustaining.
- Also, with lots more kids getting free tuition, lots more kids are going to college. So little colleges have popped up everywhere to absorb all of the increased demand (and to take all of that "free" state money).
Bottom line - the program is rapidly going broke.
N747JB
Final Approach
And now that its broke and cuts and changes are being made, people are screaming bloody murder!!
Doggtyred
En-Route
This is very cool, if it works, you have just saved me a pile of money. I can rip off the people who put in the time, money, creative talent, and effort to create books.
Soon, nobody will have to purchase books at all, we can just copy them, this will be great.
Authors and publishers will be forced to work for the public good, rather than their rip off profits. They will be inspired by all the public gratitude to come up with even better books. Is this exciting or what?
-John
And how is that different from buying the book used from Amazon, digitizing it, then selling it for the same amount of money I bought it for, and using the digital images on my viewing device?
The publisher gets none of the take from the used sale. The user gets their money back from the subsequent used sale.
Ethically different but practically same outcome as the scenario you detest.
(and for what its worth, I buy my books for my masters degree online at Amazon, and except for a VERY VERY few of them, sell them the day after the final)
EppyGA
Touchdown! Greaser!
Well stated Kyle, spot on!
denverpilot
Tied Down
And now that its broke and cuts and changes are being made, people are screaming bloody murder!!
When you believe lies that you know can't be sustained by simple math and logic... there usually is a bunch of whining on the back end.
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Drake the Outlaw
Without the grade inflation, I *think* the program would have been viable over the long term. But the colleges are financially motivated to keep kids in school, which means they are financially motivated to shift the grade distribution to one which allows students to keep their "free" tuition.
Essentially, we have the fox guarding the henhouse.
Honestly, I'm not sure the elected officals were smart enough to see that coming. I don't remember anyone predicting where the program has gone. As I recall, the only people who were against the program when it started were people who objected to the lottery on religious or moral grounds.
poadeleted21
Touchdown! Greaser!
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I'm not religious and I'm DEEPLY against lotteries. 1) They are a tax on the poor. Rich folks don't buy lottery tickets. 2) They're a tax on the stupid. only idiots buy lottery tickets. 3) They are very hypocritical of government, especially in states that don't allow gambling. 4) People standing in line breathing out of their mouth buying the stupid tickets and scratching their cards while I'm trying to pay for my M&M's Peee me off.
CJones
Final Approach
The best explanation of a lottery I've heard is: 'A tax on people that are bad at math'.
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Drake the Outlaw
I'll put you down as against, based on moral issues.
azure
Final Approach
We don't -- we wait until the new edition is at least 2 semesters old before switching. In the first semester that we use the new edition, I provide a translation chart between the chapter numbers in the previous and new editions. The latest upgrade to our textbook involved, unfortunately, a complete rewrite of 3 of the later chapters, with significant new material added. Several students using the old edition still ignored my attempts to bridge the gap. It's just not humanly feasible to try to support multiple editions of the book.
It's not so much of an issue in the lecture section, but the online section is heavily dependent on the book because of the way the course is designed (a decision that is, as Dr. Bruce would say, several pay grades above me).
denverpilot
Tied Down
I used to use that quote, until I realized that taxes aren't optional and buying lottery tickets is.
poadeleted21
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denverpilot
Tied Down
You must not make enough money
If you mean I'm not "Too big to fail" yet, correct.
Hey, JP Morgan's traders gave back the $29 million they each made in the last two years. Yes, years. "Largest clawback in U.S. history" or some such lovely wording by a drooling mouth-breathing Fourth Estate...
They only cost the company $7B by current estimates. And they both still have jobs.
Pretty amazing isn't it?
Nah... they just know where the bodies are buried.
azure
Final Approach
It's really exciting to hear someone who is an expert in their field go into depth about it, provided they can communicate it well to non-specialists. But I have to wonder what topics your prof sacrificed so that he could spend a month on Type 1a supernovae -- as important a topic as that is for cosmology, if I glossed over, say, the solar system and methods for measuring distances, temperatures, luminosities, etc. I would get some complaints from students and the end result would be that I would be reprimanded by the department, and rightly so. The course I teach is not only an elective course for non-science majors, but now also a required intro course for incoming undergrads majoring in astronomy. I'd be doing my degree students a disservice if I focused on my interests to the exclusion of the core material. There just isn't enough other stuff to free up a whole month.
Devils advocate here................................
What if NASA or some other organization launches a deep space probe that proves a Supervnovae is bogus and wormholes were just a theory that was 180 degrees off in concept... Does the universities refund the 100's of millions they charged to teach gullible students a unfounded concept ? Will they buy back all the textbooks they required the students to read that stated incorrect data ..?
.. They thought the world was flat for thousands of years... Ms Curie claimed X rays were harmless for years till research proved her wrong. This quantum physics thing is just a unproven theory that happens to fit a few mathmatical models....Of course I could be wrong too..
:wink2:
Good thing schools never got a dime of my money.
ARFlyer
En-Route
Our intro class is a requirement to fill in a science slot. So its normally full of people who want an easy grade or so they thought. Our class also had planetarium shows once a week in our planetarium. However don't get me started on the digital projector vs the Zeiss war within the physics dept.
He would talk about Type 1a Supernova off and on depending on the class. Some classes would come back to Type 1a via some discussion, some distance he gave or if he ran out of things to talk about. Some classes he had experiments using anything from rubber balls to high voltage arc lamps. He would also give life lessons during the class. Some of them are:
"It's always better to be safe than to be in an ant-pile having your head sawed off by a blunt bamboo sword" - Talking about Priests predicting eclipses
"Astrology can be disproved by the gravitational pull of the OB/GYN at your birth" - He had a whole mathematical formula to prove this idea!
To be on subject:
The lottery and full ride scholarships have caused our school to be WAY overpopulated. We have two cities here that give full ride in-state scholarships to anyone who graduates from their high school. So now the all guy & all girl dorm have three to four people when they use to only hold TWO. However I am not eligible for the lottery scholarship because they classify me as a nontraditional student. This was because I had been in school for ONE semester before the lottery started. So they set the rules as anyone who was in school before it started are not eligible.
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azure
Final Approach
Ah, okay. That's different and it doesn't sound like he really spent a month on it. Though I can't imagine running out of things to talk about. The way our course is designed it's pretty hard to cover everything we're expected to cover in one semester. We have discretion to cut a few special topics and there is no way to get through all of it otherwise.
Ha! I think a lot of us have used that one.
In case he didn't tell you: it's straight out of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. 
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
John Baker
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John Baker
There are millions of kids out there who are convinced they do not need an education. They have their futures all worked out, and are planning on simply winning the lottery just as soon as they are old enough to play.
Becoming a millionaire does not require an education, all it requires is a carefully thought out plan. The reason everyone doesn't do that is because they just don't know how to play the lottery properly, whereas they do.
There you have it, the lottery is a good thing. Just think, in a few years there will be millions of new millionaires, spending all that money they won, and getting our economy rolling again.
-John
Becoming a millionaire does not require an education, all it requires is a carefully thought out plan. The reason everyone doesn't do that is because they just don't know how to play the lottery properly, whereas they do.
There you have it, the lottery is a good thing. Just think, in a few years there will be millions of new millionaires, spending all that money they won, and getting our economy rolling again.
-John
ARFlyer
En-Route
Zeiss. Without question.
I agree 100% however everyone but one professor agrees that the Zeiss has to go. They say it's old-fashion, too expensive and a high learning curve on operation.
They got a single digital projector system about two years ago and it SUCKS! The stars are square pixels and you can clearly see the jagged pixels around the edge of the screen. The resolution is about 1028x768 around a 9' radius dome so its like watching YouTube at 240p.