"In time for the new school year, the Government Accountability Office has released a sobering report on the soaring price of textbooks. Over the past two decades, the report tells us, 'college textbook prices have risen at double the rate of inflation.'

We're used to paying $25 for a hardcover novel, but my casebook on contracts now sells to students for $103, and the best-selling general chemistry textbook (co-authored by my father-in-law) costs $148. At state universities, textbooks and supplies account for 26 percent of all student fees, including tuition. At junior colleges, they are a whopping 72 percent.

...[P]rofessors' incentives in choosing textbooks are in some ways more distorted than doctors' incentives in choosing drugs. You see, I earn a $10.30 royalty on every copy of my textbook that a student buys. Instead of just trying to get the best book for my class (and to do so I should weigh both quality and price), I might also consider assigning my own book and increasing my profit.

This is a self-dealing transaction, which would be presumptively illegal if professors owed a fiduciary duty to students. Some professors realize this and donate to charity the royalties they earn when they assign students their own books." 

(Source:  Ian Ayres, "Just What the Professor Ordered," The New York Times, September 16, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/opinion/16ayres.html?th&emc=th.)

"Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.

Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:  Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.

For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil."

(Source:  The Teacher, Ecclesiastes 12:11-14, Holy Bible, New International Version, International Bible Society, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984.)

Parents searching for a way to give their children help in the classroom need look no further than the ring finger on their left hand.  A new study published in the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage clearly shows that parents who make their marriage successful are conferring a remarkable academic benefit on their children - especially their daughters.

By using data for 265 seniors enrolled in a Colorado Springs public high school, researcher Barry D. Ham assesses "the impact of divorce in relation to students' academic achievement."  And the pattern is clear: "Adolescents from intact homes perform better academically and maintain better school attendance than do those students from either single-parent or remarried homes."

Ham calculates that in comparison with peers from other family structures, students from intact families earn GPAs that average more than 17% higher.  He further calculates a distinctively low rate of absenteeism among students from intact families, who missed 78% fewer class periods than peers from non-intact households.

While some have supposed that parental remarriage will erase the harmful effects of parental divorce, Ham finds that, overall, "children in remarried households performed no better than children in either single-mother or single-father families."  More careful parsing of the data, however, indicates that "when a stepparent is brought into the home, the males somehow benefit" while females do not.  Highlighting it as "one of the most significant findings of this study," Ham points to statistics indicating that "females were more negatively impacted" than males by living in a stepfamily created after parental divorce.

Ham does not comment on the irony of his findings in a social world in which feminists generally regard parental divorce and the stepfamilies it produces with indifference. He does see in his findings strong indications that, compared to peers in non-traditional homes, "those students residing with their two biological parents appear to be given an increased chance to excel educationally."