As the prices of required textbooks often vary, one never knows what to expect come a new semester.
Getting back the money spent on supplemental materials is as important as getting back a deposit when moving out of one’s apartment.
Being that nobody wants to make it easy on students by simply loaning out books, or putting materials online, or God forbid, providing free textbooks, hustling books to one another or selling these burdensome materials back to bookstores are what most students find themselves doing.
Will you really need that Earth Science book? How about that good old math book?
One will definitely want to keep that one on the bookshelf for a nice read!
Most EC students are taking general education classes, which, for the most part, have little, if nothing, to do with most students’ prospective majors.
Some students are even unfortunate enough to have instructors who are so lax that books listed on the syllabus are not even cracked open.
This can often lead to student’s becoming enraged at going out of his or her way to go to the campus bookstore, wait in the ridiculously long line that accompanies the beginning of any semester and fork out the cash for a book that will have gone un-read by the end of the semester.
Shame on the few known instructors who have so betrayed the institution of learning that they would even print a syllabus out with no intention on aligning the curriculum with it.
Filing for financial aid, tracking down people who’ve just taken one’s prospective course and buying the required text from them, or asking to borrow it, using the photo-copying machines available for student use or any other alternative to the grueling advent of buying up bundles of paper can all ease the obligatory task.
Surely, tuition is not that large an issue compared to the prices of some textbooks and the burden of buying them; perhaps because the textbooks can cost more than the cost of units per course.
Books that are kept in pristine and respectable conditions should be bought back at full-price.
Students need money, not the publishers, printers and the few instructors who only teach using his or her own publication.
Education is a wonderful thing, an invaluable necessity that has always been kept on a pedestal.
In times past, only the elite were educated, making books a luxury.
Burdened so, as some students are by the monetary consequences of obtaining an education, it is notable that the fruits of it all are well worth it.