This week, the Basement Medicine staff investigated the price of text books, and why class materials seem to be such a burden on a large number of the students on campus. What they found was that students may need to look into alteratives to buying these supplies on campus.

Some professors, such as Ann Turkle and Gina Mireault seem to recognize the struggle their students have with the heavy burden of expensive textbooks, noting that the average textbook and materials cost for one student for a semester is over $1,000.

Add this to the debt that students will already be in with rising tuition costs, and the fact that most students don’t have full-time jobs until they graduate, and the picture is not pretty.
Many students will be working to pay off their debt for years, and possibly decades after completion .

So, why do so many professorsmake us purchase new editions of the same text year after year? And is there anyway professors can use informational resources other than textbooks?

We all know that the new editions of textbooks don’t offer many changes from previous editions. Take two editions of the same math textbook for example. One year, in order to save money, I purchased the previous edition of a pre-calculus textbook, and it was no surprise that all of my math problems were the same as in the new edition. The only difference was the way that information was presented and the numbering of the problems.

And, of course, the price tag.

I probably saved $20 on that book alone. It must also be taken into consideration that I purchase all my books on Amazon rather than from the Summit Bookstore.

This semester, I compared the prices of textbooks on Amazon versus the campus bookstore before purchasing them, and found that by buying online, I was saving nearly $80 on my books.
That’s $80 that I could use toward food and rent.

I also bought the minimum amount of classroom materials to get me through the semester in order to save another $10.

Sometimes, penny pinching is the only way students can get by, and it doesn’t help that with inflation and overhead at publishing companies, the average cost of books from 1978 to now has risen over 800 percent.

Maybe if the bookstores, or the Brick-and-Mortar textbook companies lowered their prices, students would be able to afford to eat without asking their parents for more money.

I know that some students can access their parents’ wallets to pay for college, but I sure couldn’t. That’s why I’ve worked between 30 and 40 hours a week since my freshman year, on top of a fulltime course load.

The stress was manageable, to a point, and I made it this far, but when will students be able to catch a break?

-Kayla Friedrich, Editor-in-Chief