College professors: Why do you generally have your students buy very expensive textbooks?

I don’t. For my programming course, I list three books I think would be helpful, and I list them as optional. No one has to buy a book.

IMO, professors who can’t teach without a textbook are lazy. You should be able to create your own lessons, notes, presentations, and tests without needing the student to follow along in a book.

The worst, by far, are the professors who make their students buy their own text book. That’s just evil and rude and self-serving. I hate professors like that.

When I was in college studying lit and history, I had no required texbooks. All our reading was from primary source material, either available as paperbacks or on reserve in the library. As a librarian in a college, I know that has changed and that the cost of books is astronomical. It is often hard to use a second hand older edition as new and revised editions come out frequently. A colleague just told me that there is a growing trend for textbooks to be available in an online – for a much lower fee – format. This will no doubt be the wave of the future.

Although I’m not a professor, I have taught at the college level, and for most of these courses the expensive books are the very best. For instance, the Campbell & Reece biology text is unbeatable.

If you plan to continue in the field, you will find a good textbook useful for many other classes in the future.

When I was in college and broke, I used textbooks on reserve at the library. Free, and forced me to go and study for a solid two hours without interruption.

A lot of professors don’t give a crap about students – they have no incentive to. Publishing companies send them tons of textbooks in the hopes of selling them. They pick one to use out of convenience – for them, not you. It’s easier to make a textbook required for a course than to build your own lesson plan using books readily available at the local Barnes and Nobles….that would require work….and time…neither of which they want to spend on you unless you’re research. It’s really incredible that they don’t care about stuff like this because presumably they also went through the hardship of buying textbooks in their 9 years of seeking out a PhD.

Yeah the Campbell & Reece text is a classic, but they also have released several editions. The content doesn’t change all that much over the editions so you can easily go to the library, like you said, and borrow an older edition for free. The only problem with doing this is that the homework problems assigned in the new version aren’t the same (or are rearranged) from the old version so it can be a real hardship to figure out what the questions are.

I would not want to learn engineering from books you can find at Borders. Although some of my classes didn’t have required textbooks, and others I borrowed from friends or the library or simply did without (and my GPA suffered as a result), most did require very expensive texts. They could easily use an old edition of a book which would be MUCH less expensive, but they don’t.

Some of my classes even had required texts that were never ever used at all over the course of the year! Those professors were quickly added to the top of my shit list. They were the ones showing up late to teach the class and putting zero preparation into their assigned student advising responsibility. If only students were a factor in tenure decisions, maybe those shithead lemons wouldn’t survive in academia.

@MrItty I disagree with you. I had a math course where the prof had written a textbook on the subject and was using it for the course. His text was under $50, which was a friggin’ steal. And, it was very well written.

I would argue that if a prof uses his own book, he will probably teach his course better than if he uses someone else’s. Orthodontists have many different tools and methods available to them to straighten teeth, but they go with the one they are most familiar and most comfortable with, and arrive at the same end result as others would have using other tools and methods. Same goes for teaching and pretty much everything else.

And you have to remember that the world is small, particularly in academia. Even if your prof isn’t using his own text, he may be using the text of a friend, as was the case with a chemistry course I took. That book was in the triple digits, kind of a classic but still. The only thing that substantially changes from edition to edition is price so requiring a newly minted book is highway robbery.

@lilikoi Your argument depends on the assumption that the textbook is for the benefit of the professor, that the professor needs a book to teach the course.

I disagree. The textbook is for the benefit of the student. The professor should be able to teach without any book. The point of offering a textbook along with the professor’s lectures and notes is to give multiple styles of presenting the work. That way, students who just aren’t “getting it” the way the professor is teaching have an alternative. They can read the book and see if it makes more sense the way the book’s author presented the material.

Professors who choose their own book are cheating the students out of this opportunity. They have only one source material to learn from. If the professor’s style doesn’t register with them, they have no alternative, no recourse. Plus, the professor is being either arrogant enough to believe that his book is the “best” out there, or lazy enough to not find out if there are any better ones out there.

Your college experience will be costing you several thousands of dollars at least, and depending on the school, quite possibly several tens of thousands of dollars. The difference between your professor’s $50 book and an alternative but possibly better $100 book is meaningless. The quality of the educational experience, on the other hand, is un-priceable.

(To use your analogy: a dentist needs his dental tools to perform dentristy. A college professor should not need a book, any more than actors need subtitles on a foreign movie in which they star. The subtitles are for the benefit of the people reading them. The books are for the benefit of the student using them.)

My biggest issue was with two professors I had this year. One wrote the books himself…so he was getting income from that, and it was specific books you had to have. There were so many grammatical and spelling errors that it was difficult to study. I can’s believe the guy gets away with that crap. (his tests were incredibly easy though, because of these books…all the answers in them. I only took the courses to raise my gpa)
My other professor had us purchase an extremely expensive special edition…I only learned it was special addition when I went to do the book return for a little bit of money. They refused to take it because of it being “special” or whatever, and said to try again in the Fall. I was not pleased.
I will say though, some of my courses have had very expensive books but ones that I can reference for future classes or the books just interest me in general…so the cost is worth it.
I’m very lucky now though, that all my books and materials are paid for with grants.

I’m not a professor, but when I was in school I first looked for used textbooks in the college bookstore. I also price shopped on Amazon to see if I could get some cheaper on there.

I agree that some classes, like most, if not all, of the science classes as well as math classes require texts specialized enough that you need actual textbooks but I’m a media production major and there are a large number of comprehensive books about film and the technology used in film available at bookstores. So far, two of my professors have required the kind of books you can find in a Barnes and Noble and they are very well written and very comprehensive about their subjects. They also cost about 12 bucks each. This is only because I was too lazy to go to an actual Barnes and Noble, so I just bought them in the school store. They probably would have been a lot less somewhere else.

@MrItty You are right that the book is for the benefit of the student. However, at the end of the day there needs to be a synergy between the lectures and the book. They must complement each other. They must work together. If you provide students with a book that presents the material in a different way, I would think this synergy would be harder to obtain.

Your argument assumes that professors know something, anything about teaching. This is often not the case. There are no incentives for professors to teach, let alone teach well. It is a misconception that professors are teachers. In fact, they are researchers. Their tenure, peer and industry respect, ultimately their very success hinges on the quantity and quality of the research they churn out, not on the quality of their teaching.

I have taken courses where no book was used. Instead, handouts were provided. This was hard to keep track of and follow. I much prefer a book that is neatly organized.

I never considered that a person would rely on a textbook for a different style of material presentation. Perhaps that is true. Although, the library on my campus had tons of texts on all the subjects I studied in college so if one was really determined to understand something there was no shortage of resources available to do so.

My prof’s $50 book happened to be excellent. And if you didn’t think so, why not just go to the library and find a different one? You will never be able to please everyone together.

Perhaps it is different depending on what you are studying. Engineering is pretty cut and dry. You either get it or you don’t. There is very little gray area at the undergraduate level where multiple perspectives should be considered, very little that is controversial.