Textbooks? Check! Tuition? No Comment!
Has anyone noticed how the school systems work nowadays? Particularly colleges.
They give you a choice: either you pay your tuition, which can be on a semester by semester basis, or it can be annually like at a university.
You either shell out the thousands per year plus room and board if you reside in a dorm, or you can pay hundreds per unit at a small community college. But what they do not tell you is that textbooks are not included along with your tuition.
Textbooks are actually supplied by an entirely different company altogether, one which is just as selfish as the colleges are. Not only are the prices for the textbooks substantial, but whether used or new, most of them are the same price anyway, not including tax, and if you decided to not buy it directly from the supplier of the college, you can go on the internet and find them even more expensive there. So either way, its a crap shoot finding a textbook at a decent price anywhere.
I do not know where this world is going, but lately, even when it comes to education, you must be wary of scam artists. The whole textbook debacle is a scam because they know that your back is against the wall, and that you, the student, will end up paying their prices without negotiation, because once the class starts you're going to need their product to get a passing grade in class.
One of two things can happen here: one is that colleges can lower their tuition, and in this economy that will mean they're losing money. Or two, the textbook suppliers themselves can either disappear altogether or give the colleges a discount and have the colleges supply a certain amount of their textbooks for every subject on the library shelves and make them available to the students of the school. I think the latter is a fabulous solution, but since the corporate world is so money hungry nowadays, that might be a tad bit difficult to muster up.
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