Peeking into the rock

So my daughter has to take this physics class. She has to buy a two hundred dollar textbook. She can't share, or use a second-hand book, because the class also requires a thirty-dollar clicker ( a thing that you use to answer quizzes in class and to participate in various class exercises), which cannot be registered without the book. And in order to have the homework count, she has to pay another thirty dollars or so to register at the publisher's website.

This is an introductory physics class. It's a crucial class for, I think, most of the science majors.

Her textbooks, all told, come to over six hundred dollars. Did I ever tell you that at UCSC students take only three academic classes a quarter, because the quarters are so short, and the classes theoretically therefore so intense?

The kid has financial aid that covers all this, mainly because she lives at home.

Now imagine you are a young person whose family does not reside in town. Imagine that you are a good student but not the very best and not the cleverest at getting financial aid -- maybe the higher ed tradition is not so strong in your family and you're piecing this together with some financial aid and some low-wage kid jobs and you're living in a room somewhere -- maybe two or three students to a room in a house on the bus line, or maybe in a dorm or the "University Inn." Imagine what it means to you to be told that you have to spend over two hundred and fifty dollars on a single book and a bit of technological gimcrack that probably costs three dollars to assemble?

What do we think the physics department was thinking when they adopted a two-hundred dollar textbook for a class in Newtonian physics? ("ooh, shiny," most likely)

They sure weren't thinking about the much-talked about mandate to recruit and retain more science students from underrepresented groups, like, for example, students from working-class backgrounds.