I understand the court ruling, and the paywalls kinda make sense because publishing costs money. However, libgen was and is one of the best tools for research. I don't want to pay for content that...
I understand the court ruling, and the paywalls kinda make sense because publishing costs money. However, libgen was and is one of the best tools for research. I don't want to pay for content that may not even answer the questions I'm trying to answer. Even within a university network, plenty of papers are still locked behind a damn paywall. Paywalls stifle innovation by restricting access to only those with the most funding.
My university had a good relationship with publishers. I seem to recall there was very little you couldn’t actually gain access to through our library portal, assuming you were actually a student....
Even within a university network, plenty of papers are still locked behind a damn paywall
My university had a good relationship with publishers. I seem to recall there was very little you couldn’t actually gain access to through our library portal, assuming you were actually a student. But oh my god was it cumbersome. Useless search functionality. Multiple different accounts/networks you would have to log into depending on who published the paper, and just a shit load of buttons you’d have to click to actually “request” to view the paper.
I gave it a good shake after our school librarian gave us a speech begging us to use library resources. But I gave up after realizing how bad it was compared to the simplicity of just copy pasting urls from google scholar into Libgen. I never went back, and I personally feel like using Libgen actually helped me. It allowed me to effortlessly include academic references in all my papers which were all legit, and the professors who actually checked appreciated that.
Yeah, accessing papers through legit mechanisms is so cumbersome even if you can do it. It's like that classic adage from Valve -- it's impossible to beat piracy if piracy is more convenient. And...
Yeah, accessing papers through legit mechanisms is so cumbersome even if you can do it. It's like that classic adage from Valve -- it's impossible to beat piracy if piracy is more convenient. And the gulf in convenience between piracy and legit methods in academia is massive.
Only adjacently related, but as someone with a viewpoint outside of academia (mostly), it drives me up the wall that publicly funded studies are still frequently paywalled. My tax dollars went to...
Only adjacently related, but as someone with a viewpoint outside of academia (mostly), it drives me up the wall that publicly funded studies are still frequently paywalled. My tax dollars went to this, and I'm not allowed to access it myself for free, and just have to blindly trust whatever website is referencing it?
I can agree with that. When profits are getting in the way of acedemic correctness, something needs to change. That spits in the face of the whole educational system.
I can agree with that. When profits are getting in the way of acedemic correctness, something needs to change. That spits in the face of the whole educational system.
At my university, the system for accessing papers was similarly useless, and it wasn't the university's fault. After my first semester there, I gave up trying to use it. Instead, I just downloaded...
At my university, the system for accessing papers was similarly useless, and it wasn't the university's fault. After my first semester there, I gave up trying to use it. Instead, I just downloaded and/or linked to the papers on LibGen or SciHub for my citations. Literally zero of my professors ever gave me shit for it. One of them politely asked me to use the official sources in my final drafts. That was it.
I can also count on one hand the number of professors I had who didn't suggest that we pirate the textbook for their class. A few of them just straight up included a Google Drive link to the book in their syllabus.
It's incredible how universally disliked the greedy practices of academic publishing are, yet they remain.
Honestly, good professor. Showing you in real time how to succeed. Capture a market and force the need of your product onto others against their will. Especially works if customer is on some sort...
Honestly, good professor. Showing you in real time how to succeed. Capture a market and force the need of your product onto others against their will. Especially works if customer is on some sort of credit plan, like a school loan...
Lmao, no argument there. He was actually one of the good ones, actually set up a graduate fellowship thing so I could go do unpaid development stuff over the summer rather than go work on...
Lmao, no argument there. He was actually one of the good ones, actually set up a graduate fellowship thing so I could go do unpaid development stuff over the summer rather than go work on marketing bacon flavored mayonaise for Kraft. He claimed he got no money from sales to students at our uni...but we still had to buy it.
I would have honestly preferred buying it straight "from him", rather than seeing the publisher get 100% of the profit, assuming he was being truthful.
I just really hate publishers after doing STEM in undergrad and every STEM prof providing free texts/websites-that-were-basically-free-textbooks-they-had-written.
The law and business profs tended to take the opposite path.
Off topic, but are the business professors the ones who were doing that? I never experienced it personally but always heard about the dreaded $300 textbook required by the guy who wrote it.
Off topic, but are the business professors the ones who were doing that? I never experienced it personally but always heard about the dreaded $300 textbook required by the guy who wrote it.
The really bad ones when I went (which I am now realizing was indeed a decade ago, yikes) were the ones where you were basically paying for a barcode that would let you access some online platform...
The really bad ones when I went (which I am now realizing was indeed a decade ago, yikes) were the ones where you were basically paying for a barcode that would let you access some online platform or workbook or something, and the actual textbook was either non-existent or barely used.
Increasingly Pearson's go-to with textbook companies making agreements with the universities that their online homework platforms will be course requirements...
Increasingly Pearson's go-to with textbook companies making agreements with the universities that their online homework platforms will be course requirements...
In my experience, the most expensive textbooks were for low-level courses in the business or STEM side of things that a lot of people took as gen eds or pre reqs, because those were the courses...
In my experience, the most expensive textbooks were for low-level courses in the business or STEM side of things that a lot of people took as gen eds or pre reqs, because those were the courses most likely to have some sort of online code system that meant you couldn't get them used or online. I had an accounting textbook that was obnoxious about this. None of my experiences with this had any connections between profs and the textbook that I'm aware of, though. My impression was that portions of market for textbooks in those domains are just like that.
The only classes I took where a prof required their own textbook were my Chinese courses, since our uni's Chinese department published the speaking and listening textbook series we used. But they were pretty cheap as far as textbooks go iirc (something like $30-$60 a semester iirc, and that included the CD) and to be fair to our department, there aren't actually very many good options on the speaking/listening side of things for Chinese. We used textbooks published elsewhere for reading/writing.
The humanities departments at my alma mater were definitely a good place to be as far as textbook spending went. I think every single one of my linguistics courses provided us with scans of any relevant textbooks they wanted to use -- a couple times I'd buy the textbook before the first class and the prof would say something like "yeah I have to put something on there but you don't need to actually buy it, here's a pdf of the section we're using." The courses I took in the English department usually did require us to get the books we'd be reading, but since they were usually normal books it didn't suffer from the usual textbook price issues (and also wouldn't have been hard to find on the high seas either typically).
that's surprising. I'm sure it wasn't everything, but I had access to dozens, maybe hundreds of journals and all their research within a university. And if I needed something specific the...
Even within a university network, plenty of papers are still locked behind a damn paywall.
that's surprising. I'm sure it wasn't everything, but I had access to dozens, maybe hundreds of journals and all their research within a university. And if I needed something specific the librarian always gave me access (even if it's not an instant process).
I think this reliance on libgen is more a call to action to properly fund the library system, though. We have an entire digital realm to take advantadge of but there's so many obstacles placed to fully enjoy that (on the librarian's end).
Even if university libraries had more funding, publishers would just raise prices. The incentives of academics encourages publishers being awful and making access difficult.
Even if university libraries had more funding, publishers would just raise prices. The incentives of academics encourages publishers being awful and making access difficult.
It's definitely a push and pull. Be interesting to see if the schools give in first or if that publisher gets undercut by a more willing one. I genuinely don't know the outcome. I think that "just...
It's definitely a push and pull. Be interesting to see if the schools give in first or if that publisher gets undercut by a more willing one. I genuinely don't know the outcome.
I think that "just raises prices" is a consequence of having no skin in the game, though. Universities don't care about price spikes, that's for the government funding and budget. If it doesn't fit, just raise tuition or add some mystious "other fees" to the tune of thousands of dollars onto the education.
And goverment doesn't care about tuition hikes, more unbankputable loans to hand out. It's not like one day (like, these past few years) that that bubble bursts and people simply can't pay anything...
When prices go up university libraries cut journals. Academics hate the journal system, which hypothetically promises peer reviewed and thus quality work, but in reality the publishers don't have...
When prices go up university libraries cut journals. Academics hate the journal system, which hypothetically promises peer reviewed and thus quality work, but in reality the publishers don't have that expertise and rely on unpaid labor of yet more academics to review. Those professors have required amounts of research, teaching, and other activities in their contracts, they don't generally if ever, have "peer review papers." So it's not always done well and it's in the publisher's interest to get paid, not be correct.
But yeah, most universities fold first, even just with regular sorts of budget cuts.
(That said they do care about tuition hikes. Raising tuition isn't no big deal) But fees usually go to the library, not tuition. Raising those, or housing and dining, isn't good either.
People have this mistaken assumption that colleges and universities don't absolutely hate increasing any tuition or fees. If tuition is going up faster than inflation, the biggest factor is a lack...
People have this mistaken assumption that colleges and universities don't absolutely hate increasing any tuition or fees.
If tuition is going up faster than inflation, the biggest factor is a lack of public funding. If fees are going up faster than inflation, it's because students are expecting ever-more services that become increasingly difficult to provide.
How do we square the circle of tuition growing just as fast as student loan limits? Giving students more money to spend on tuition doesn't exactly encourage universities to be efficient and charge...
How do we square the circle of tuition growing just as fast as student loan limits? Giving students more money to spend on tuition doesn't exactly encourage universities to be efficient and charge less. I'm asking legitimately because I have been worried that education suffers from Baumol's cost disease (Vox, Wikipedia).
Raising tuition reduces access to who can attend, and students who attend and need more aid are rarely a financial boon (great students). We're finding higher needs in undergrads, whether that is...
Raising tuition reduces access to who can attend, and students who attend and need more aid are rarely a financial boon (great students). We're finding higher needs in undergrads, whether that is due to accepting more students with those needs or greater levels of needs in the general population I haven't had time to really dig into. So schools want people, not to price people out, and they do want to cover services (which are not generally covered by tuition but it depends) but they don't sit in a room gleefully raising tuition because they see students as pilea of money. Ive participated in the process of raising housing costs at a university and it's pure math on that end. It's math that accounts for needing to do major repairs and renovations to big old concrete buildings. (Old elevators end up needing custom parts leading to long downtimes, new elevators are very expensive, there's math about when that works out) But it's still based on costs of cleaning and painting and staffing and the like.
It's not clear to me that loans and tuition have in fact grown at the same rate. If they did, is it that loan amounts increased to cover increases in tuition instead?
But this suggests that student debt has jumped much higher than tuition costs. And I track with this, with almost all of my loans being from grad school.
Increased loan availability accounts for some of the cost increase, but it varies by time period and is hotly debated (Richmond Fed). At least some colleges have used increased tuition and fees to...
Increased loan availability accounts for some of the cost increase, but it varies by time period and is hotly debated (Richmond Fed). At least some colleges have used increased tuition and fees to bloat their admin budgets (u/vordCato). You're also right that student debt has increased significantly faster than tuition for unclear reasons (Philadelphia Fed)
Can't speak for every college, but in Pennsylvania, the amount coming in from the state barely budges upwards (and sometimes downwards) over the course of decades, so public colleges that rely on...
Can't speak for every college, but in Pennsylvania, the amount coming in from the state barely budges upwards (and sometimes downwards) over the course of decades, so public colleges that rely on those funds to keep tuition low basically are forced to choose between downsizing and providing a crappier experience or upping tuition.
Think like how many states pay less than $10 a day for jurors, because that rate was set when $10 a day was a median day's wage, then they never scaled it. PA likes to do that with education funding.
For what it's worth, at my school, a solid 20% of all tuition collected is redirected back towards the most-needy students in the form of performance and need-based grants. The public universities really are trying, but are hamstrung in many terrible ways.
This is my experience in Illinois, public, as well. The state legislature has proposed some new funding model but I'm not convinced it'll pass or be better than what we have. It might at least be...
This is my experience in Illinois, public, as well. The state legislature has proposed some new funding model but I'm not convinced it'll pass or be better than what we have. It might at least be consistent.
I don't know our exact numbers on what goes back, but I know they're taking more from every budget for those students (which is overall a good) but then we need more staff to support those students too.
I mean, giving students more public money to spend on tuition certainly does prevent those students who would need to seek private student loans to afford college though. While this technically...
I mean, giving students more public money to spend on tuition certainly does prevent those students who would need to seek private student loans to afford college though. While this technically would be allowing students to spend more on tuition, it would enable more people to afford college who otherwise couldn't, as iirc private student loans have a lot of features that make them worse even than the shitty system we have for public student loans. I had $1000 extra in grants on top of my tuition, and I still maxed out my federal student loans in order to afford rent and food during undergrad.
I think your concerns about tuition just rising past them again is justified, but it is worth noting that when tuition is rising anyway, it doesn't equally affect all students. Public funds are an important part of remedying that, even if they don't solve the rising tuition problem on their own.
Well said. Private student loans are predatory, but I'm personally uncertain about replacing them with more public loans. Parent Plus loans are terrible for example. The cost of college is a...
Well said. Private student loans are predatory, but I'm personally uncertain about replacing them with more public loans. Parent Plus loans are terrible for example. The cost of college is a really difficult issue because of how many factors go into the price and payment.
Directly subsidizing professor's salaries could help without encouraging admin bloat? Unfortunately, I'm not really qualified to come up with good solutions to this problem. I'd like to fund community colleges more based on my experiences at one, but they have worse graduation statistics than four-year institutions.
Many (most?) community colleges don't offer four-year degrees at all and offer far more opportunities that don't lead to degrees at all, so it's not necessarily a failing that they have lower...
Many (most?) community colleges don't offer four-year degrees at all and offer far more opportunities that don't lead to degrees at all, so it's not necessarily a failing that they have lower graduation rates. Many people currently recommend attending a community college for the first year or two and then transferring to a four-year school afterwards, as this cuts down on coats considerably, and that would not be reflected as a graduation from the community college statistically even though it's serving its purpose perfectly and the student goes on to finish their degree.
The changes I would make to how US universities (at least public ones) if I were in charge would be far more radical than changing the amount of public funding or how it's targeted. Many are part of large problems with the structure of our educational system that are only exacerbated by how funding happens, imo. I was extraordinarily privileged the whole way through, though, and I feel that in the immediate term, increasing funding may be the only way many people can even afford to get higher education at all.
Also they often accept folks with lower minimum scores/grades and while they're equipped to provide some of those lower levels classes those are often the students who will leave school for other...
Also they often accept folks with lower minimum scores/grades and while they're equipped to provide some of those lower levels classes those are often the students who will leave school for other reasons too.
I am frustrated at how much "retention" (and thus graduation) matters sometimes. I get why it's a metric but, staying in school is sometimes the wrong answer for an individual. Because they need to take time off for medical or mental health reasons. Because they're not emotionally or academically ready for living away from home or a 4 year institution. Because they hate it at this school or don't want to be in college. Because they're failing and as much as they want to stay, failing is a very expensive lesson.
yeah I think the improved accessibility of community colleges is a huge point in their favor. They're also so much more accommodating to non-traditional students.
yeah I think the improved accessibility of community colleges is a huge point in their favor. They're also so much more accommodating to non-traditional students.
Agreed, you'd have to look at the "why" for retention rates being lower - did they transfer? Did they have to stop doing school and return to work? Are they academically too far behind? All of...
Agreed, you'd have to look at the "why" for retention rates being lower - did they transfer? Did they have to stop doing school and return to work? Are they academically too far behind? All of that is out of the control of the college.
Perhaps I should've said dropout rates. Community college underperform depending on how you slice the stats, but my n=1 sample is the professors were much better teachers for intro level courses.
Perhaps I should've said dropout rates. Community college underperform depending on how you slice the stats, but my n=1 sample is the professors were much better teachers for intro level courses.
My personal experiences in intro-level courses was more or less indistinguishable between the local community college and local private Catholic college at which I did post-secondary enrollment...
My personal experiences in intro-level courses was more or less indistinguishable between the local community college and local private Catholic college at which I did post-secondary enrollment and the large state university I attended for undergrad. Class size was a much bigger factor (and only indirectly affected by which one I took a particular course at -- the state university did worst on this metric for these types of intro-level courses). I honestly think there's very little downside to getting the intro-level gen eds out of the way by doing a semester or two at a community college before transferring to a university (or getting those same courses out of the way during post-secondary enrollment options in your last couple years of high school, which I and my younger siblings did).
I'll be a bit more fair here. I'm sure price hikes hurt a lot of staff and faculty who gain nothing from it. But it sure does seem like administrators absolutely love the party while it lasts....
People have this mistaken assumption that colleges and universities don't absolutely hate increasing any tuition or fees.
I'll be a bit more fair here. I'm sure price hikes hurt a lot of staff and faculty who gain nothing from it. But it sure does seem like administrators absolutely love the party while it lasts. Otherwise, why have they grown to a point where the admin/student ratio is something absurd like 1:3 in some acclaimed places?
Maybe if that kind of attention went to the faculty directly serving the students I could be more sympathetic.
I think we're mixing up admins here: There are some student facing admins, like for financial aid or course planning, but I've always heard IT admins as a separate category. Most admins that come...
I think we're mixing up admins here:
College administrators make recommendations about admissions; oversee the disbursement of university materials; plan curricula; oversee all budgets from payroll to maintenance of the physical plant; supervise personnel; keep track of university records (everything from student transcripts to library archives); and help students navigate the university bureaucracy for financial aid, housing, job placement, alumni development, and all the other services a college provides.
There are some student facing admins, like for financial aid or course planning, but I've always heard IT admins as a separate category. Most admins that come to mind focus on the school and managing the school. Often time it feels like they focus on the school more than its participants.
I'm of course not working in the school system, so I can be mistaken. So this could all amount to an image problem. I always dreaded when I needed to go to that admin office to dispute some financial aid issues.
The problem is when universities say "administrator" they mean leadership. At least in my experience. So there is for example a VP of Student Affairs but he oversees counseling, student health,...
The problem is when universities say "administrator" they mean leadership. At least in my experience. So there is for example a VP of Student Affairs but he oversees counseling, student health, police, housing, dining, Dean of students (student conduct and student activities and programming board), civic engagement, career services, and probably more departments. Most of the "Staff" are in those departments, not in the VP's office (he has some, they're training or strategic planning or fundraising).
My department (housing) has staff that handle business operations, facilities, student support services, student conduct, residence life, assignments, marketing (communications, social media, etc.), the support staff (office managers) for them and then the live on campus staff that serve on-call and are generalists, doing a lot of roommate conflicts management and supervision of RAs. We have over 150 student support cases in the first six weeks of school, many more conduct cases, and roommate conflicts are not tracked in a way that lets us count them easily. My position is a new one, because I oversee the student support people (and do that myself), because our caseload has exploded post-covid. It was justified by our data and the math.
That's just one department. Huge incoming classes mean advisors have huge numbers of students. Counselors are full. When they make the case that more are needed it's similarly data based. There's a point past where you can just spread the workload thinner, use peer advisors (who must be supervised) and so on.
There's just no giant pot of money being funneled into pockets - explicit fraud (that's caught by audits) aside.
Our records are open enough that when shady shit was happening the local NPR station (on campus) did an exposé and we all got audited even though our nose was clean.
Sorry I rambled, but I do understand that financial aid is one of the least fun places to be on campus, and some of that is that the advisors cannot find money to help everyone, but I work with them regularly and they're really great at helping a student who needs a hand work through their options or give the info to apply for being an independent student status or something. I know there are shitty employees everywhere but Fin Aid doesn't get kickbacks for what it denies, ya know.
I can at least speak for myself (and I think I'm accurate about my dept) that none of us care more about the institution than the students. We might focus on the impact to the community over an individual student (like with disruptive behavior)but even then, my whole deal is working with those individuals too.
It seems crude, but: if a university cannot support a bigger classs, why not simply not accept more students? Students at my alma mater were already complaining about huge class sizes and lack of...
Huge incoming classes mean advisors have huge numbers of students. Counselors are full. When they make the case that more are needed it's similarly data based.
It seems crude, but: if a university cannot support a bigger classs, why not simply not accept more students? Students at my alma mater were already complaining about huge class sizes and lack of office hour time over a decade ago, and it only seems worse today. Students in my day already accepted that they would need a 2nd,3rd, 6th choice of college because there's no guarantee a competitive college will pick you. Because all we were are a common app that an admissions admin reads for 30 seconds. But there are fortunately more college than ever.
The one caveat I understand is that some public colleges needed to accept local students with a GPA over something absurdly low (for my college it was pretty much a 2.0 and a 1100 SAT, or 1400 during that time with the 3rd category). That definitely needs a reform as more kids go to college and not much more space is there for them.
There's an external pressure due to the upcoming demographic "cliff" where there will be 10 percent fewer graduating HS seniors next year. It's existential for smaller schools. Fewer people will...
There's an external pressure due to the upcoming demographic "cliff" where there will be 10 percent fewer graduating HS seniors next year. It's existential for smaller schools. Fewer people will be going to college for the next decade or so. But also those who go want the admin support - more advisors, more mental health support - and staff won't put up with being overworked and underpaid the way they might have in the past. (Gen Z in particular)
But yes there's also state reqs for admission. And a distinct lack of funding from the state for those.
I've seen what those admin staff get paid. I get paid almost double many of them, and I still make 30% less than an equivalent private sector. For a large university, cost of IT staff is easily...
I've seen what those admin staff get paid. I get paid almost double many of them, and I still make 30% less than an equivalent private sector.
For a large university, cost of IT staff is easily double any of the positions you mention. You probably want a competant database administration team insuring that things are running smoothly. Or a crack networking team, as a large campus has as many logistical problems as a regional ISP.
Competing with the private sector for wages when they'res no profit in it really throws a wrench in operational costs.
indeed. I don't know what and how they all get grouped as "admins", but the term can refer anywhere from a desk clerk making $20/hr to what's basically a headmaster or one rank below making far...
I've seen what those admin staff get paid. I get paid almost double many of them, and I still make 30% less than an equivalent private sector.
indeed. I don't know what and how they all get grouped as "admins", but the term can refer anywhere from a desk clerk making $20/hr to what's basically a headmaster or one rank below making far into the 6 figures. Still, when you're adding more staff but not necessarily more property that staff needs to manage (heck, my school had a few abandoned closed off buildings) and you only see increasing tuition, it makes you question what you're really paying for. 10-12 more staff @ 20 an hour starts to add up to one of those headmaster levels, after all.
Am I the only one thinking that them suing an organization with no known members is basically the same as if they were to sue a literal strawman or even a ghost? I get the legal arguments for this...
Am I the only one thinking that them suing an organization with no known members is basically the same as if they were to sue a literal strawman or even a ghost? I get the legal arguments for this going through... but in practical terms it's something of a farce, isn't it?
In practical terms this ruling seems like it does a fair bit of stuff. Shutting down advertising revenue, making domain names easier to shut down, making linking to it illegal — I don’t think it...
In practical terms this ruling seems like it does a fair bit of stuff. Shutting down advertising revenue, making domain names easier to shut down, making linking to it illegal — I don’t think it will kill it but it will make it harder for casual users to get to it, which might mean increased revenues for publishers, albeit at a cost to societal progress.
Those times when the story referenced is somehow just as interesting as the main story. It's even more interesting that the judge ruling is so sensible.
The lawsuit was placed under the argument that God owned property in Sonoma County, due to the Limeliters singer Lou Gottlieb transferring the deed of his Morning Star Ranch to God about a week before. The deed was ruled invalid, due to God not being able to take possession of the property, and hence Penrose's lawsuit was also ruled invalid.
Those times when the story referenced is somehow just as interesting as the main story. It's even more interesting that the judge ruling is so sensible.
It's interesting that this is all happening at the same time media/distribution companies are doubling down on enshitification, reducing accessibility and raising prices. In the past year they've...
It's interesting that this is all happening at the same time media/distribution companies are doubling down on enshitification, reducing accessibility and raising prices. In the past year they've managed to take down Yuzu (Switch emulator), Tachiyomi (manga downloader), and dozens of anime and cartoon piracy sites were just hit with DMCAs and taken down in the last month (Kisscartoon being the most prominent). Makes me wonder what's next on the chopping block...
Granted, all of the anime and manga services killed have already been replaced. The Index lives on, and there are plenty of options (torrents are evergreen). Yuzu is unique, but also the devs shot...
Granted, all of the anime and manga services killed have already been replaced. The Index lives on, and there are plenty of options (torrents are evergreen).
Yuzu is unique, but also the devs shot themselves in the foot by not tiptoeing around the obvious piracy issues. Emulators remain legal with emulation still a grey zone.
My main point is that instead of improving their offer to attract people to their services and away from piracy, corpos seem to be putting more effort into destroying the "competition". Piracy...
My main point is that instead of improving their offer to attract people to their services and away from piracy, corpos seem to be putting more effort into destroying the "competition". Piracy won't die, but companies can definitely make it harder to find/access for the average consumer. It galls me that they're more focused on doing that than providing something better (and it seems to go hand in hand with their products getting progressively worse). Maybe I'm just cynical and it's just a coincidence, but I have a hard time believing this isn't a coordinated move given the narrow window of time.
I doubt it's all coordinated considering the timeframes involved. At least for the ones I'm familiar with, it only takes one publisher being lawsuit happy to pull a site down. Some publishers like...
I doubt it's all coordinated considering the timeframes involved. At least for the ones I'm familiar with, it only takes one publisher being lawsuit happy to pull a site down. Some publishers like Shueshia (Shounen Jump) have recently focused on making their content much more accessible.
I'd actually say anime/manga is the best example of this. There are multiple entities currently going after anime/manga websites and they have shut down dozens of them in the last 6 months:...
I'd actually say anime/manga is the best example of this. There are multiple entities currently going after anime/manga websites and they have shut down dozens of them in the last 6 months:
ACE (an organisation whose members include Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal Studios, Disney, Warner bros and Discovery) successfully shuts down a major site and associated domains including anime sites and they're not stopping there.
Sure there isn't some sort of global cabal that gets together scheming to take down sites (though arguably ACE might fit the bill). But it sure as hell looks like the level of enshitification is proportional to companies' zeal for taking down piracy websites.
Why would anyone with alternatives pay monthly for this expensive fragmented clusterfuck of a media landscape when you have almost everything easily accessible in one place? Easy - force them by getting rid of the alternatives.
I understand the court ruling, and the paywalls kinda make sense because publishing costs money. However, libgen was and is one of the best tools for research. I don't want to pay for content that may not even answer the questions I'm trying to answer. Even within a university network, plenty of papers are still locked behind a damn paywall. Paywalls stifle innovation by restricting access to only those with the most funding.
My university had a good relationship with publishers. I seem to recall there was very little you couldn’t actually gain access to through our library portal, assuming you were actually a student. But oh my god was it cumbersome. Useless search functionality. Multiple different accounts/networks you would have to log into depending on who published the paper, and just a shit load of buttons you’d have to click to actually “request” to view the paper.
I gave it a good shake after our school librarian gave us a speech begging us to use library resources. But I gave up after realizing how bad it was compared to the simplicity of just copy pasting urls from google scholar into Libgen. I never went back, and I personally feel like using Libgen actually helped me. It allowed me to effortlessly include academic references in all my papers which were all legit, and the professors who actually checked appreciated that.
Yeah, accessing papers through legit mechanisms is so cumbersome even if you can do it. It's like that classic adage from Valve -- it's impossible to beat piracy if piracy is more convenient. And the gulf in convenience between piracy and legit methods in academia is massive.
Only adjacently related, but as someone with a viewpoint outside of academia (mostly), it drives me up the wall that publicly funded studies are still frequently paywalled. My tax dollars went to this, and I'm not allowed to access it myself for free, and just have to blindly trust whatever website is referencing it?
We all benefit from accessible knowledge.
I'm personally for abolishing copyright entirely, so suffice it to say I agree with you there lol
Yeah I'm with you. I'd settle for some more reasonable implementations of copyright but that's apparently too much to ask for.
Library systems in public universities is still government funded. Especially their websites. So that explains the molasses approach to it.
I think the for-profit enterprises involved in publishing academic research are far more to blame.
I can agree with that. When profits are getting in the way of acedemic correctness, something needs to change. That spits in the face of the whole educational system.
At my university, the system for accessing papers was similarly useless, and it wasn't the university's fault. After my first semester there, I gave up trying to use it. Instead, I just downloaded and/or linked to the papers on LibGen or SciHub for my citations. Literally zero of my professors ever gave me shit for it. One of them politely asked me to use the official sources in my final drafts. That was it.
I can also count on one hand the number of professors I had who didn't suggest that we pirate the textbook for their class. A few of them just straight up included a Google Drive link to the book in their syllabus.
It's incredible how universally disliked the greedy practices of academic publishing are, yet they remain.
One of my professors would upload the PDFs to the class page with Z-Library's URL still in the filename lol.
And then you have the business profs forcing their own $300 textbook on you 🤣
Honestly, good professor. Showing you in real time how to succeed. Capture a market and force the need of your product onto others against their will. Especially works if customer is on some sort of credit plan, like a school loan...
Lmao, no argument there. He was actually one of the good ones, actually set up a graduate fellowship thing so I could go do unpaid development stuff over the summer rather than go work on marketing bacon flavored mayonaise for Kraft. He claimed he got no money from sales to students at our uni...but we still had to buy it.
I would have honestly preferred buying it straight "from him", rather than seeing the publisher get 100% of the profit, assuming he was being truthful.
I just really hate publishers after doing STEM in undergrad and every STEM prof providing free texts/websites-that-were-basically-free-textbooks-they-had-written.
The law and business profs tended to take the opposite path.
Off topic, but are the business professors the ones who were doing that? I never experienced it personally but always heard about the dreaded $300 textbook required by the guy who wrote it.
A few GE's did that to me . They were cheaper a decade ago, but we're still talking about $120 for these leaflets of notes they called a "textbook"
The really bad ones when I went (which I am now realizing was indeed a decade ago, yikes) were the ones where you were basically paying for a barcode that would let you access some online platform or workbook or something, and the actual textbook was either non-existent or barely used.
Increasingly Pearson's go-to with textbook companies making agreements with the universities that their online homework platforms will be course requirements...
In my experience, the most expensive textbooks were for low-level courses in the business or STEM side of things that a lot of people took as gen eds or pre reqs, because those were the courses most likely to have some sort of online code system that meant you couldn't get them used or online. I had an accounting textbook that was obnoxious about this. None of my experiences with this had any connections between profs and the textbook that I'm aware of, though. My impression was that portions of market for textbooks in those domains are just like that.
The only classes I took where a prof required their own textbook were my Chinese courses, since our uni's Chinese department published the speaking and listening textbook series we used. But they were pretty cheap as far as textbooks go iirc (something like $30-$60 a semester iirc, and that included the CD) and to be fair to our department, there aren't actually very many good options on the speaking/listening side of things for Chinese. We used textbooks published elsewhere for reading/writing.
The humanities departments at my alma mater were definitely a good place to be as far as textbook spending went. I think every single one of my linguistics courses provided us with scans of any relevant textbooks they wanted to use -- a couple times I'd buy the textbook before the first class and the prof would say something like "yeah I have to put something on there but you don't need to actually buy it, here's a pdf of the section we're using." The courses I took in the English department usually did require us to get the books we'd be reading, but since they were usually normal books it didn't suffer from the usual textbook price issues (and also wouldn't have been hard to find on the high seas either typically).
Yeah, it wasn't very often but it was the only place I remember seeing it happen.
that's surprising. I'm sure it wasn't everything, but I had access to dozens, maybe hundreds of journals and all their research within a university. And if I needed something specific the librarian always gave me access (even if it's not an instant process).
I think this reliance on libgen is more a call to action to properly fund the library system, though. We have an entire digital realm to take advantadge of but there's so many obstacles placed to fully enjoy that (on the librarian's end).
Even if university libraries had more funding, publishers would just raise prices. The incentives of academics encourages publishers being awful and making access difficult.
It's definitely a push and pull. Be interesting to see if the schools give in first or if that publisher gets undercut by a more willing one. I genuinely don't know the outcome.
I think that "just raises prices" is a consequence of having no skin in the game, though. Universities don't care about price spikes, that's for the government funding and budget. If it doesn't fit, just raise tuition or add some mystious "other fees" to the tune of thousands of dollars onto the education.
And goverment doesn't care about tuition hikes, more unbankputable loans to hand out. It's not like one day (like, these past few years) that that bubble bursts and people simply can't pay anything...
When prices go up university libraries cut journals. Academics hate the journal system, which hypothetically promises peer reviewed and thus quality work, but in reality the publishers don't have that expertise and rely on unpaid labor of yet more academics to review. Those professors have required amounts of research, teaching, and other activities in their contracts, they don't generally if ever, have "peer review papers." So it's not always done well and it's in the publisher's interest to get paid, not be correct.
Here's one attempt to do something about it
But yeah, most universities fold first, even just with regular sorts of budget cuts.
(That said they do care about tuition hikes. Raising tuition isn't no big deal) But fees usually go to the library, not tuition. Raising those, or housing and dining, isn't good either.
People have this mistaken assumption that colleges and universities don't absolutely hate increasing any tuition or fees.
If tuition is going up faster than inflation, the biggest factor is a lack of public funding. If fees are going up faster than inflation, it's because students are expecting ever-more services that become increasingly difficult to provide.
How do we square the circle of tuition growing just as fast as student loan limits? Giving students more money to spend on tuition doesn't exactly encourage universities to be efficient and charge less. I'm asking legitimately because I have been worried that education suffers from Baumol's cost disease (Vox, Wikipedia).
Raising tuition reduces access to who can attend, and students who attend and need more aid are rarely a financial boon (great students). We're finding higher needs in undergrads, whether that is due to accepting more students with those needs or greater levels of needs in the general population I haven't had time to really dig into. So schools want people, not to price people out, and they do want to cover services (which are not generally covered by tuition but it depends) but they don't sit in a room gleefully raising tuition because they see students as pilea of money. Ive participated in the process of raising housing costs at a university and it's pure math on that end. It's math that accounts for needing to do major repairs and renovations to big old concrete buildings. (Old elevators end up needing custom parts leading to long downtimes, new elevators are very expensive, there's math about when that works out) But it's still based on costs of cleaning and painting and staffing and the like.
It's not clear to me that loans and tuition have in fact grown at the same rate. If they did, is it that loan amounts increased to cover increases in tuition instead?
But this suggests that student debt has jumped much higher than tuition costs. And I track with this, with almost all of my loans being from grad school.
Increased loan availability accounts for some of the cost increase, but it varies by time period and is hotly debated (Richmond Fed). At least some colleges have used increased tuition and fees to bloat their admin budgets (u/vord Cato). You're also right that student debt has increased significantly faster than tuition for unclear reasons (Philadelphia Fed)
Can't speak for every college, but in Pennsylvania, the amount coming in from the state barely budges upwards (and sometimes downwards) over the course of decades, so public colleges that rely on those funds to keep tuition low basically are forced to choose between downsizing and providing a crappier experience or upping tuition.
Think like how many states pay less than $10 a day for jurors, because that rate was set when $10 a day was a median day's wage, then they never scaled it. PA likes to do that with education funding.
For what it's worth, at my school, a solid 20% of all tuition collected is redirected back towards the most-needy students in the form of performance and need-based grants. The public universities really are trying, but are hamstrung in many terrible ways.
This is my experience in Illinois, public, as well. The state legislature has proposed some new funding model but I'm not convinced it'll pass or be better than what we have. It might at least be consistent.
I don't know our exact numbers on what goes back, but I know they're taking more from every budget for those students (which is overall a good) but then we need more staff to support those students too.
I mean, giving students more public money to spend on tuition certainly does prevent those students who would need to seek private student loans to afford college though. While this technically would be allowing students to spend more on tuition, it would enable more people to afford college who otherwise couldn't, as iirc private student loans have a lot of features that make them worse even than the shitty system we have for public student loans. I had $1000 extra in grants on top of my tuition, and I still maxed out my federal student loans in order to afford rent and food during undergrad.
I think your concerns about tuition just rising past them again is justified, but it is worth noting that when tuition is rising anyway, it doesn't equally affect all students. Public funds are an important part of remedying that, even if they don't solve the rising tuition problem on their own.
Well said. Private student loans are predatory, but I'm personally uncertain about replacing them with more public loans. Parent Plus loans are terrible for example. The cost of college is a really difficult issue because of how many factors go into the price and payment.
Directly subsidizing professor's salaries could help without encouraging admin bloat? Unfortunately, I'm not really qualified to come up with good solutions to this problem. I'd like to fund community colleges more based on my experiences at one, but they have worse graduation statistics than four-year institutions.
Many (most?) community colleges don't offer four-year degrees at all and offer far more opportunities that don't lead to degrees at all, so it's not necessarily a failing that they have lower graduation rates. Many people currently recommend attending a community college for the first year or two and then transferring to a four-year school afterwards, as this cuts down on coats considerably, and that would not be reflected as a graduation from the community college statistically even though it's serving its purpose perfectly and the student goes on to finish their degree.
The changes I would make to how US universities (at least public ones) if I were in charge would be far more radical than changing the amount of public funding or how it's targeted. Many are part of large problems with the structure of our educational system that are only exacerbated by how funding happens, imo. I was extraordinarily privileged the whole way through, though, and I feel that in the immediate term, increasing funding may be the only way many people can even afford to get higher education at all.
Also they often accept folks with lower minimum scores/grades and while they're equipped to provide some of those lower levels classes those are often the students who will leave school for other reasons too.
I am frustrated at how much "retention" (and thus graduation) matters sometimes. I get why it's a metric but, staying in school is sometimes the wrong answer for an individual. Because they need to take time off for medical or mental health reasons. Because they're not emotionally or academically ready for living away from home or a 4 year institution. Because they hate it at this school or don't want to be in college. Because they're failing and as much as they want to stay, failing is a very expensive lesson.
yeah I think the improved accessibility of community colleges is a huge point in their favor. They're also so much more accommodating to non-traditional students.
Agreed, you'd have to look at the "why" for retention rates being lower - did they transfer? Did they have to stop doing school and return to work? Are they academically too far behind? All of that is out of the control of the college.
Perhaps I should've said dropout rates. Community college underperform depending on how you slice the stats, but my n=1 sample is the professors were much better teachers for intro level courses.
My personal experiences in intro-level courses was more or less indistinguishable between the local community college and local private Catholic college at which I did post-secondary enrollment and the large state university I attended for undergrad. Class size was a much bigger factor (and only indirectly affected by which one I took a particular course at -- the state university did worst on this metric for these types of intro-level courses). I honestly think there's very little downside to getting the intro-level gen eds out of the way by doing a semester or two at a community college before transferring to a university (or getting those same courses out of the way during post-secondary enrollment options in your last couple years of high school, which I and my younger siblings did).
I'll be a bit more fair here. I'm sure price hikes hurt a lot of staff and faculty who gain nothing from it. But it sure does seem like administrators absolutely love the party while it lasts. Otherwise, why have they grown to a point where the admin/student ratio is something absurd like 1:3 in some acclaimed places?
Maybe if that kind of attention went to the faculty directly serving the students I could be more sympathetic.
Do students like having in-dorm wifi? How about a helpdesk to help get things configured, setup and repaired?
All of your IT staff are admins.
I think we're mixing up admins here:
There are some student facing admins, like for financial aid or course planning, but I've always heard IT admins as a separate category. Most admins that come to mind focus on the school and managing the school. Often time it feels like they focus on the school more than its participants.
I'm of course not working in the school system, so I can be mistaken. So this could all amount to an image problem. I always dreaded when I needed to go to that admin office to dispute some financial aid issues.
The problem is when universities say "administrator" they mean leadership. At least in my experience. So there is for example a VP of Student Affairs but he oversees counseling, student health, police, housing, dining, Dean of students (student conduct and student activities and programming board), civic engagement, career services, and probably more departments. Most of the "Staff" are in those departments, not in the VP's office (he has some, they're training or strategic planning or fundraising).
My department (housing) has staff that handle business operations, facilities, student support services, student conduct, residence life, assignments, marketing (communications, social media, etc.), the support staff (office managers) for them and then the live on campus staff that serve on-call and are generalists, doing a lot of roommate conflicts management and supervision of RAs. We have over 150 student support cases in the first six weeks of school, many more conduct cases, and roommate conflicts are not tracked in a way that lets us count them easily. My position is a new one, because I oversee the student support people (and do that myself), because our caseload has exploded post-covid. It was justified by our data and the math.
That's just one department. Huge incoming classes mean advisors have huge numbers of students. Counselors are full. When they make the case that more are needed it's similarly data based. There's a point past where you can just spread the workload thinner, use peer advisors (who must be supervised) and so on.
There's just no giant pot of money being funneled into pockets - explicit fraud (that's caught by audits) aside.
Our records are open enough that when shady shit was happening the local NPR station (on campus) did an exposé and we all got audited even though our nose was clean.
Sorry I rambled, but I do understand that financial aid is one of the least fun places to be on campus, and some of that is that the advisors cannot find money to help everyone, but I work with them regularly and they're really great at helping a student who needs a hand work through their options or give the info to apply for being an independent student status or something. I know there are shitty employees everywhere but Fin Aid doesn't get kickbacks for what it denies, ya know.
I can at least speak for myself (and I think I'm accurate about my dept) that none of us care more about the institution than the students. We might focus on the impact to the community over an individual student (like with disruptive behavior)but even then, my whole deal is working with those individuals too.
It seems crude, but: if a university cannot support a bigger classs, why not simply not accept more students? Students at my alma mater were already complaining about huge class sizes and lack of office hour time over a decade ago, and it only seems worse today. Students in my day already accepted that they would need a 2nd,3rd, 6th choice of college because there's no guarantee a competitive college will pick you. Because all we were are a common app that an admissions admin reads for 30 seconds. But there are fortunately more college than ever.
The one caveat I understand is that some public colleges needed to accept local students with a GPA over something absurdly low (for my college it was pretty much a 2.0 and a 1100 SAT, or 1400 during that time with the 3rd category). That definitely needs a reform as more kids go to college and not much more space is there for them.
There's an external pressure due to the upcoming demographic "cliff" where there will be 10 percent fewer graduating HS seniors next year. It's existential for smaller schools. Fewer people will be going to college for the next decade or so. But also those who go want the admin support - more advisors, more mental health support - and staff won't put up with being overworked and underpaid the way they might have in the past. (Gen Z in particular)
But yes there's also state reqs for admission. And a distinct lack of funding from the state for those.
I've seen what those admin staff get paid. I get paid almost double many of them, and I still make 30% less than an equivalent private sector.
For a large university, cost of IT staff is easily double any of the positions you mention. You probably want a competant database administration team insuring that things are running smoothly. Or a crack networking team, as a large campus has as many logistical problems as a regional ISP.
Competing with the private sector for wages when they'res no profit in it really throws a wrench in operational costs.
indeed. I don't know what and how they all get grouped as "admins", but the term can refer anywhere from a desk clerk making $20/hr to what's basically a headmaster or one rank below making far into the 6 figures. Still, when you're adding more staff but not necessarily more property that staff needs to manage (heck, my school had a few abandoned closed off buildings) and you only see increasing tuition, it makes you question what you're really paying for. 10-12 more staff @ 20 an hour starts to add up to one of those headmaster levels, after all.
Am I the only one thinking that them suing an organization with no known members is basically the same as if they were to sue a literal strawman or even a ghost? I get the legal arguments for this going through... but in practical terms it's something of a farce, isn't it?
In practical terms this ruling seems like it does a fair bit of stuff. Shutting down advertising revenue, making domain names easier to shut down, making linking to it illegal — I don’t think it will kill it but it will make it harder for casual users to get to it, which might mean increased revenues for publishers, albeit at a cost to societal progress.
You joke, but that hasn't stopped people from suing god before. There's even a Wikipedia page on it
Those times when the story referenced is somehow just as interesting as the main story. It's even more interesting that the judge ruling is so sensible.
Tag yourself; I'm a junior partner on His staff
It's interesting that this is all happening at the same time media/distribution companies are doubling down on enshitification, reducing accessibility and raising prices. In the past year they've managed to take down Yuzu (Switch emulator), Tachiyomi (manga downloader), and dozens of anime and cartoon piracy sites were just hit with DMCAs and taken down in the last month (Kisscartoon being the most prominent). Makes me wonder what's next on the chopping block...
Granted, all of the anime and manga services killed have already been replaced. The Index lives on, and there are plenty of options (torrents are evergreen).
Yuzu is unique, but also the devs shot themselves in the foot by not tiptoeing around the obvious piracy issues. Emulators remain legal with emulation still a grey zone.
My main point is that instead of improving their offer to attract people to their services and away from piracy, corpos seem to be putting more effort into destroying the "competition". Piracy won't die, but companies can definitely make it harder to find/access for the average consumer. It galls me that they're more focused on doing that than providing something better (and it seems to go hand in hand with their products getting progressively worse). Maybe I'm just cynical and it's just a coincidence, but I have a hard time believing this isn't a coordinated move given the narrow window of time.
I doubt it's all coordinated considering the timeframes involved. At least for the ones I'm familiar with, it only takes one publisher being lawsuit happy to pull a site down. Some publishers like Shueshia (Shounen Jump) have recently focused on making their content much more accessible.
I'd actually say anime/manga is the best example of this. There are multiple entities currently going after anime/manga websites and they have shut down dozens of them in the last 6 months:
Webtoon taking legal action against 170 sites right around when their performance wanes.
Japan and Brazil teaming up to take down 16 sites
ACE (an organisation whose members include Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal Studios, Disney, Warner bros and Discovery) successfully shuts down a major site and associated domains including anime sites and they're not stopping there.
4 Japanese manga publishers have filed DMCA subpoenas against multiple sites.
Sure there isn't some sort of global cabal that gets together scheming to take down sites (though arguably ACE might fit the bill). But it sure as hell looks like the level of enshitification is proportional to companies' zeal for taking down piracy websites.
Why would anyone with alternatives pay monthly for this expensive fragmented clusterfuck of a media landscape when you have almost everything easily accessible in one place? Easy - force them by getting rid of the alternatives.