Year: 2010
Transfer Issues Major Topic at Academic Senate Meeting
Pierce College’s Academic Senate met today to discuss the issues plaguing the school’s transfer students. Members of the committee touched on the rise in competition to transfer to four year universities, as well as the state of the Job Placement Center’s internship program. However, with all the good news that was announced, bad news always seemed to follow shortly.
COLUMN: New editions, old information
Along with the renewed motivation every semester brings, comes the dread of paying the high cost of learning, or rather new textbooks.
This semester had a little extra disappointment to deliver. While California battles it’s very own budget crises, Pierce succumbs to higher tuition fees, cancelled classes and a diminished academic schedule due to cuts in funding.
The beginning of February had every class filled to the brim with additional desperate students standing outside doorways in an attempt to add.
And to layer icing over an already abundantly stuffed cake, 363 new edition textbooks waited on the shelves of the Student Store. Preventing the already thousands of textbooks from being recycled and resold and the already broke student from getting some of their 100 plus dollars back.
Now, this wouldn’t be so disappointing if the previous edition was more than 2 years old, desperately outdated and not being sold for a fraction of the price. It would also be less disappointing, if there wasn’t a district set mark-up of 38.3% and a 10 to 20 dollar cost increase with every new edition.
In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index, textbook prices are increasing at more than four times the inflation rate for all finished goods.
And maybe if there was new vital information it wouldn’t be so hard to stomach. But the reality is, that new edition textbooks are practically replicas of their predecessors. Students are lucky to see a new picture, or even different homework questions.
Nothing has changed in the past five years or even 10 years in statistics that would justify the destruction of who knows how many forests just to burn all the old editions and force the new ones upon every college book store in the nation.
Yet the four main publishers who run this oligopoly do it anyway.
It would be easy to blame the teacher who complains about these publishing companies and cost of books and still puts the new edition under required text on their syllabus? But even they have little control.
The student store is required to provide the appropriate text for every class on campus. And even if the teachers deny the publishers representatives that give them copies of new editions in an attempt to sell them, when it comes time to order, the old editions have miraculously disappeared.
In short, if there is a new edition, the Student Store is selling it and the teacher is using it.
It’s a practice that should be illegal. Publishers should be required to prove a sufficient amount of vital new information before being able to produce more copies of the same old, same old and call it new. Of course, this will never happen because this is a supposedly free market society that accompanies heart palpitations with every thought of socialism, and in some ways is only just beginning to progress past the McCarthy era (thanks to health care).
So it’s up to the little guys. Students with the support of the teacher are the only ones capable of ending this madness. This doesn’t mean rent instead of buy, or illegally copy a copy righted text book. It means, refusing to buy new editions and buying the old ones from the zillions of online vendors instead for less than a third of the price. It means ending the waste of hard earned money and life supporting trees.
They’re carbon copies of each other. It’s as ridiculous as paying 100 dollars for a prescription drug instead of 15 dollars for the generic brand that has the same exact ingredients.
Students, the leaders of the future, deserve to catch a break. In this rich nation tuition is amongst the highest across the globe and a college degree no longer secures the likely hood of a job. Students shouldn’t have to deal with thieving multibillion dollar companies on top of that. It’s time to take a stand.
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Jobs and Degrees in Meeting
Story on Academic Senate meeting on 3-22-10.