Jamal Greene: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we made textbooks free, wouldn’t either tuition go up or the quality go down in some other way? At least with textbooks, there is a built-in price discrimination, so poorer students can buy used copies or older editions. But if the quality of food in the cafeteria declines or tuition goes up, everyone bears that, and in that sense, the change would be regressive. That’s possible. I think it would be folded into tuition. Part of it is the students make different choices when they perceive it to be something that’s a baked-in cost versus perceiving it to be something that they have to pay for separately. If some students are buying used books or some students are buying only digital copies just because of their perception of the cost, that seems to me to have some real unfairness to it. Now, it’s possible that there’s not that big of a difference; it’s not a significant enough difference that we should care about the distributional consequences. But I tend to think that, just as other law school costs are not à la carte, textbooks shouldn’t be either. You could say the same thing about courses, right? Sure. How would you improve the LSAT system?…

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