In response to the high price of college textbooks, some educators are taking steps to promote a free-market approach to educational material. Professor Preston McAffee at California Institute of Technology has made his introductory economics textbook available for free online and allows printing companies to sell copies of it for $10 to $50, marking an incredible departure for a textbook that would probably be sold by major publishes for about $200, according to The New York Times. McAffee told The Times that the current textbook-selling strategy is inherently flawed because the professors who assign textbooks do not have to pay for them, while students have little choice but to pay whatever a company wants to charge. Richard G. Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University, has furthered the pursuit of free educational material through the creation of Connexions, a repository for textbooks from a wide variety of disciplines. Connexions allows users to edit and compile sources and create their own educational material, provided they credit the original author.
Harvard University's endowment grew to an overall value of $36.9 billion after an 8.6 percent return during the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2008, according to the Harvard News Office. In fiscal year 2008, distributions from the endowment totaled $1.6 billion, contributing more than one-third of Harvard's operating budget. Harvard drew national attention in December 2007 with its substantial financial aid increases for students, which were made possible by its large endowment. Dartmouth and other peer institutions have not yet published information about endowment spending and growth from the 2008 fiscal year.
Brown University, known for its system in which
undergraduates can independently create an individualized curriculum, is considering a significant overhaul of its educational philosophy, according to the Inside Higher Education web site. Since 1969, Brown has not had a core curriculum or distributive requirements. Instead, students are required to concentrate in a specific department, complete enough credits to graduate and pay their bills. Brown administrators said that the university will continue to embrace self-directed learning, and requirements for students will not change drastically, according to the Inside Higher Education news web site. The overhaul, however, intends to prompt departments to guide their majors more carefully, to create multiple new forums for advising and to craft a more cohesive educational experience for Brown's students.
