OMG! THE PRICES!!
So, after all the finaglling (is that even a WORD?!?!) that I did to get into school this semester and then I go to get the textbooks. Well, not just that. I had to have Office XP (or 2003 or later) to take the CS 101 class but managed to get the Professional edition on our 'puter at home, as Mom uses this computer when she works from home, so I didn't have to buy it. THEN, I am talking to my instructor via email and I was thinking that I didn't have to have a textbook as the schedule didn't say anything about it. It just said that you were required to have Office and Windows XP. He told me that I needed ALL the textbooks as the tutorials and the work came in the books. So, I go online to the bookstore and it's relatively easy to use. You pick the semester, then class section, the level and finally the instructor and the call # for the class. Well, it brought up Excel (just Excel) and it alone was ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY EIGHT DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS!!!!!!!!!I hope that I don't have to buy 3 more textbooks at that price (Word, PowerPoint and Access) because otherwise, I will have to get a freaking loan in order to take just that class! And the used (IF AVAILABLE) is gonna be $138.50 or something like that. My TUITION WAS ONLY $418.00. Hell, if I have to buy 3 more texts then the price for the texts for that class will exceed the tuition by at least $100.00!!!! If you add the price of purchasing the software for a used version of Office XP (which I don't know how Amazon gets by with that) it starts at $100 and the price for just the required text and software is like FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS more than the tuition for that class. My other text, which includes 4 audio CD's for some reason, $140 new and $109 used. I hope that my grant will be alot of money. It used to be that my textbooks were about 1/3 the price of my tuition . . . tuition hasn't increased much but obviously the TEXTBOOK RACKET has inflated prices to beyond anything bordering on reasonable.
I can only hope and pray that I am jumping the gun here. I am sending another email to my instructor asking him if that is ALL the texts in one book or if I will need to purchase more later in the semester . . . I am checking prices online for textbooks . . .
posted by Unknown @ 8/08/2006 11:55:00 PM
1 Comments:
To be truly set in life, all one has to do is write a textbook. Then, you can change the pictures and a few statements every few years and maniplate colleges to get the new volume every 2-3 years.
English is really bad at this. They actually change grammar and citation rules just to make the extra cash (or so it would seem).
A welcome to college success skills book just made the pictures more inclusive, thus shifting pages, and while I'm sure a few other things changed, it was only the fashions of the students that had really changed.
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