When tuition is thousands of dollars a semester minimum and into the tens of thousands per year, hundreds of dollars a semester on textbooks isn’t the problem sparking the rising cost of higher education. Textbooks are just the most immediate out of pocket observable cost for most students.

It’s salaries, administrative and faculty, because you have a highly educated workforce and highly educated workforces cost more, and it’s changing standards of “educational care,” sometimes mandated by law, sometimes by trying to stay competitive with one’s peer colleges. Public funding of higher education is declining, too.

That said, I am all for free textbooks or at least letting students use older cheaper editions.