The new era of the $400 college textbook, which is part of the unsustainable higher education bubble - Mark J. Perry, AEI

A new milestone must have been established recently – we’re now officially in a new era of the $400 new college textbook and the $300 used college textbook, see graphic in this article showing the top 15 most expensive textbooks at the University of Michigan-Flint based on a new unpublished report by Matthew Wolverton, an electronic resource management librarian at the Thompson Library (UM-Flint’s library). The graphic below shows the most expensive college textbooks by discipline at UM-Flint, based on the average price of new textbooks for each discipline in winter 2015 semester. As far as college textbooks, the new era of $400 textbooks seems to be clearly unsustainable in the face of a growing number of competitive, low-cost alternatives like free online textbooks from Open Stax College (about $40 for a printed version) and Boundless ($30 online textbooks in 25 subjects). https://www.aei.org/publication/the-new-era-of-the-400-college-textbook-which-is-part-of-the-unsustainable-higher-education-bubble/