Actual educators probably hate this shit almost as much as students do. Unauthorized learning should be not a punishable offense. I assume the professors who insist on the newest editions of textbooks are either getting kickbacks (certainly true when they wrote the book) or they were forced to by the school's policy and someone higher up is getting paid by publishers.
> * assume the professors who insist on the newest editions of textbooks are either getting kickbacks [...] or they were forced to by the school's policy and someone higher up is getting paid by publishers.*
Or maybe for logistical reasons? The latest edition will of course be easily available (though expensive). Older editions might not be easy to come by. And allowing any old edition would mean it wouldn't be possible to assign exercises from the book, since the might differ in subtle ways, or just have a different order. While these problems aren't insurmountable, they would make things much more difficult.
They could use a different texbook that doesn't pull this kind of bs or even not use a textbook at all. I never needed a single textbook for University (CS degree in Germany) - lectures typically had the professor's manuscript that you could buy for pretty much cost-to-print or just download as a PDF somewhere or you could just take notes in lectures. Exercise questions were provided directly and for most courses not even part of the final grade anyway.
Making students pay a high tuition fee and then still making them buy additional material needed for the course is insane. It really doesn't have to be this way.
Actual educators probably hate this shit almost as much as students do. Unauthorized learning should be not a punishable offense. I assume the professors who insist on the newest editions of textbooks are either getting kickbacks (certainly true when they wrote the book) or they were forced to by the school's policy and someone higher up is getting paid by publishers.