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Textbooks Prove To Be Too Expensive
 Cathy Kropp -- Staff Column
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It is the third week of classes and once again I am stuck in the middle of a textbook related nightmare.
Every year I hit the bookstore before school starts in the hope that I will be able to acquire all of the materials I will need for the upcoming semester with the small amount of savings I have. And every year I fail. The first deterrent to my dream is simple cost. I have a friend who paid $900 for her car. I pay almost half that for books for one semester. She gets a vehicle and I get a set of future dust-collectors.
It's not simply the cost of the books, but the fact that I won't have enough to cover the bill until my financial aid comes through. Every year I have at least one professor that insists on having tests during the first couple weeks of school. The plot thickens when they insist on testing the students on materials found in the required textbooks. The same required textbooks that I can�t purchase until September 16, when financial aid is dispersed.
The second deterrent is last minute changes made by the professors. Each semester I travel to the bookstore and wander up and down the aisles looking for the handy cards that will tell me the name of every book I will need for a class. Then I walk into my first class only to find out not only was I supposed to find an edition of the book that had a CD-ROM included, but there are also three other texts for me to find.
And can I find these at the local bookstore? Not usually. I am forced to dive into the Internet universe and cross my fingers that I can find an edition of the book dated later than the early eighties and with all pages intact.
Every year I have the same dream, that I won't need my textbooks before financial aid comes through and that all of the textbooks I need will be at the bookstore. But every year I wake up to this nightmare.
Cathy Kropp can be reached at [email protected].
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