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Higher education insults intelligence
 Kristen J. Kubisiak -- Staff Essay
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In order to pas the news editorial sequence, mass communications students are required to take a photography class. For this class, students need a special camera.
The camera must be 35mm with an adjustable aperture and shutter speed.
To buy such a camera can cost anywhere between $300-$500. This is an absurdly large amount of money to spend on something that many students will only use for the four months they are enrolled in the three credit class.
This is only one example of students being forced to ignore logic and financial responsibility in the name of the college degree.
Many students, for the four to five years they are in college, will be asked to bypass the important values college is supposed to teach in order to graduate.
The journalism student, who, in the future has no need for a 35mm camera with an adjustable shutter speed and aperture�especially in the dawn of digital cameras�is supposed to compliantly purchase the relic without so much as raising an eyebrow.
Maybe this falls under the assumption that fourth year students have become desensitized since first adding financial insult to financial injury freshman year at the textbook buy-backs.
First year students don't realize when they are buying their books in the fall, the sum total of which can range between $200-$300, that in the spring if they wish to sell the books back they are likely be refunded only about $25-$125 of that money.
Shocked and insulted students may decide the next year to avoid the shameful machine that is the bookstore textbook buy-back and independently sell there books to other students where, theoretically, both the seller and the buyer should make out.
The seller can ask for an amount of money closer to the actual price of the book, and the buyer will still save a substantial amount of money because the used book, will be cheaper than the new books at the book store.
This system was working well for most students.
Too well.
Book publishers and sellers quickly caught on.
In order to continue capitalizing on the students' need for books, and to keep the flow of money into the publisher's pockets constant, a wonderful invention called the "new edition," was born.
Students then became required to buy this "new edition" which crept into nearly every discipline of learning. No one other than the bookstores carried these "new editions" which, despite usually containing the majority of the same information as in the old editions � just with different topical organization and one or two new sentences�cost even more money than the old edition.
Perhaps this increase can be attributed to the new prefaces, usually the only feature blatantly distinguishing the new edition from the old.
Some progressive universities, like the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, have taken monumental steps to end this student-wallet exploitation.
At UW-LaCrosse, textbooks are provided for all undergraduate courses and some 500/600 level courses. Students may "rent" or "check out" these books for a term then return them at the end of the semester.
As long as students do not abuse these books, they do not have to pay an additional fee for the convenience.
The rental fee is included in tuition. It entitles students to rent any number of books, thus sparing them the hassle of the book purchasing and the insult of book buy backs.
Until other universities take steps to eliminate the value double standards of the institution, the lesson students are learning about life may not be the one the colleges intend to teach.
Higher education seems to mean that students must do whatever is necessary to graduate, even if it defies their better judgment.
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