Statistics for behavioural sciences class

I've had some crazy expensive books, but they capped out around $250.

400 for a textbook is time to have a very serious chat with the instructor and then up the line of administration until someone is willing to admit that they're being bribed.

There's a big push in my department (and I guess the field more broadly) to move toward using R instead of SPSS/Stata. It's open source software and with that comes a fantastic community of developers. So tons of free books teaching you how to do basic things, and even proper "textbooks" (with exercises and all that) cost like $25. Many of them are free of charge through university eBook/journal subscriptions.

There's something seriously wrong with textbook prices and (with some exceptions) it's really irresponsible of professors to require students to buy latest editions. About the only exception I could see is for books that have online content and it's a 100+ people lecture class. It's simply not feasible to do regularly graded, individual assignments there, so having an automated system online does improve on the kind of assignments you can give. When you blow $40k a year on tuition, it's reasonable to spend an extra $200 to get way more out of a class.

But in cases where it's really just about assignments from the textbook that could easily (and legally) be copied for the class -- and where students could simply read a previous edition? Yeah, that's just irresponsible to mandate.

When I got my degree the new big thing at that time was to put a lot of material (tests, homework, learning "exercises") online so that even if you had a used book, you'd have to buy an access code which were damn near as much as the book (new books of course came with a one-time use code). Now of course your prof didn't HAVE to use that stuff, and thus not require you to have an access code, but yeah, too many lazy profs.

I'm just not capitalist enough I guess. I'm all for making profits and shit, but such basic things as educational textbooks (imo) shouldn't be a $14 BILLION dollar industry in the US. Fortunately, my socialist state of California is making an investment into creating their own college and k-12 textbooks to offer schools for free/at a mere fraction of standard prices.

College textbook costs reflect a phenomena in college tuition costs where subsidies and a predatory lending environment has baked these "fixed" benefits onto an already inflated market cost.A UCSD study by Douglas Turner,who's now in the Treasury Department that found that even small adjustments in federal student aid grants would provoke sharp spikes in tuition costs. Basically universities have baked assumed benefits mainly like the GI bill, financial aid and student loans into the base cost of everything... so if the government is willing to front $10k, and the student can raise 50k via scholarships or the GI Bill and then sign up for another 50k via student loans, the universities set the tuition at the value that would capture the maximum potential of that and provide relief as necessary---doing otherwise would be "leaving money on the table". Everything in higher education, from books to housing, follow that model.

khorum_sl said:

College textbook costs reflect a phenomena in college tuition costs where subsidies and a predatory lending environment has baked these "fixed" benefits onto an already inflated market cost.A UCSD study by Douglas Turner,who's now in the Treasury Department that found that even small adjustments in federal student aid grants would provoke sharp spikes in tuition costs. Basically universities have baked assumed benefits mainly like the GI bill, financial aid and student loans into the base cost of everything... so if the government is willing to front $10k, and the student can raise 50k via scholarships or the GI Bill and then sign up for another 50k via student loans, the universities set the tuition at the value that would capture the maximum potential of that and provide relief as necessary---doing otherwise would be "leaving money on the table". Everything in higher education, from books to housing, follow that model.

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As much as I hate the predatory practices of some schools, let's not disassociate the change in culture regarding higher education and the fact that higher ed was traditionally a 'supply' based economy. In any situation where more money is willing to be paid for an object/service due to perceived value or scarcity, the costs are going to go up necessarily. The real culprit is (once again) the baby boomers here for two reasons:

1) Surplus wealth and population boom drove competition for schools once those kids hit their college years in the late '60s/early '70s. Universities could increase prices because the money was there.
2) The idiotic idea that all the boomer's kids could have a better life simply by having the opportunities their parents didn't, even though not everyone could exploit them properly (ie, become doctors/lawyers/scientists/etc.).

Both of these undercurrents (plus I'm sure to some degree the ideals of the civil rights movement if not the 1964 bill itself) led to the HEA and its amendments over that time frame because not only were costs going to rise as a huge population boom hit these schools, but also everyone felt entitled to attend even if they didn't have the capacity or the drive. Over the years this has continued without abatement - higher ed prices are absurd and only continue to rise as students and parents will literally payanyprice for the dubious chance to attend college -theirchild certainly is not going to be the one without the brains to graduate! Universities have latched onto this trend and are offering less and less complicated fields of study: 'soft sciences' and 'liberal arts' as if they offer anything of value to the student who is not already driven to learn and succeed without a non-specific education.

What you have now is a situation where any 'successful' personmusthave schooling from K-16. Gone are the ideas of trades and hard work. There is a massive social epidemic going on in this country. I've seen 8/hr jobs posted on CL for admin assistants that require a BS. A baccalaureate degree for 8/hr that you could not obtain for much less than twenty thousand dollarsifyou skimp and attend lesser for profit or certain state schools. Add to this the credit driven economy where people consider credit 'free money' and do not consider the consequences of repayment and you have a huge recipe for disaster. It's hardly illuminating to simply point the fingers at a university because they charge 'too much' when the reality is our social problems are so bad they could double their prices and the only change would be a cry for more Stafford loan allowances.

TL;DR: fuck baby boomers.

More advanced math does start to get pretty hard and scary. You have to learn notation as a language of itself. It's the only way. Trying to translate will wrek u.

My brain does not work that way. I am delighted and amazed that for some people it does... but fuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I struggle with english.

wormie_sl said:

Notation is an almost insignificant part of math.

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Well, notation is an insignificant part of learning math. The point of notation in mathematics is to simplify while still not having any ambiguity. The language of mathematics is nothing like learning another human language. Part of the problem I had with learning other human languages is dealing with that ambiguity.

The only time notation in mathematics is an issue is when going between different fields. Even then, it is usually a pretty simple matter of translating some notation to your own.

It's not the notation itself that is hard, it's the restraint required to think ONLY in that framework that starts to get difficult.

Notation is a significant part of math. It communicates the form and the function. Sure, the notation itself is mutable, but the concept that notation expresses (which are not mutable, and can only be best expressed in this particular fashion) are not.

And that IS difficult. It's not an insurmountable difficulty, but the shit does start to get hard. And there comes a point where if you're not thinking in specific mathematical symbols (if it's standard notation or some variation you've concoted for yourself) you're not going to be able to manipulate the concepts. Not being a linquist I dunno if that "technically" counts as a distinct language -- but it fits the bill for me.

That side of my brain will literally only go so far before it yells "fuck OFF" so loud that I get a headache.