After spending a sweaty summer going door to door selling pest control, you were able to put away $3,500. With school starting, it’s time to hit the stores so you are ready to study chemistry, English, physics and calculus.
New school clothes: $300. New backpack: $35. Pencils, erasers, paper: $15. This week’s grocery bill, stocking up on Top Ramen and Dr. Pepper: $150. Fall Semester tuition: $3,000. University Campus Store: there’s no money left.
The Utah Student Association has just the thing to solve your short-term crisis. They want to make textbooks available online8212;as a service provided to students for free.
You haven’t heard of the Utah Student Association, your new best friend? It is composed of student body officers from every Utah college. According to USA, the Make Textbooks Available initiative will save students $4.7 million annually. This is coupled with House Resolution 4137, a bill being presented to Congress that would require more transparency from publishers putting out revised editions that typically cost more even though the content isn’t substantially different.
Sadly, in forming the initiative, the USA didn’t bother checking with textbook publishers, authors of those textbooks or the stores that sell those books. They only considered student complaints about high prices.
Frankly, should the initiative pan out, students are just going to get dumber in the long run, and here’s the extreme reason why: If professors want to write textbooks but don’t have the incentive to do so, they will market their knowledge via another format. Instead of getting books written by leaders in the field, texts would often be authored by second-class sources. Therefore, the online textbook will have no valuable content and the reader won’t gain the knowledge intended.
Although I agree that textbooks are an incredibly expensive burden on students, the solution is not to make the content free. There are a lot of low-price options that can be found through online bookstores, e-books and book rentals. To curb a student’s hesitation to spend money on a textbook, the campus store guarantees a 50 percent buy-back deal. Rather than thinking about one-sided solutions for students, the USA would better invest its time by lobbying President Barack Obama to fund its program using federal stimulus money. He seems pretty open-minded to funding programs that produce short-term solutions.
Textbooks are part of the price for a student’s education. Take out a student loan, work part-time, whatever you need to do, but don’t ask for freebies when it comes to education. You’ll get a job and make the money back after graduation.
