Aiming to ease the pain of textbook purchases, a Textbooks Suck campaign wants to promote alternatives.
This is long overdue and completely necessary.
From data collected at FreshFest, freshmen are said to be spending an average of $469 on textbooks, UPUA Secretary Julia Schrank said.
This campaign is a University Park Undergraduate Association Academic Affairs Committee project that is aimed to inform students about how they can save money when buying books.
UPUA Chairman of the Assembly Spencer Malloy said it has a lot to do with larger policies at Penn State that ultimately make textbooks more expensive.
Malloy said they can mdecide what the students are concerned about by “reaching out to them with nontraditional methods of communication.” This will include the Textbooks Suck Twitter account, “@TEXTBOOKS_SUCK.” And with this account, they can directly communicate with Penn State students about their main concerns regarding textbook prices.
This committee wants to find out the main issues about textbooks.
UPUA Academic Affairs Chairman Ricky Pooler said that student input is necessary to give this campaign an idea of what issues need to be addressed first.
This idea is a good start in trying to aid that sinking feeling felt when students walk up to the cash register with their semester books in hand.
Semester books are too expensive, and though there is no concrete plan of action to further this project, it’s a good start. This is a problem that hasn’t gone away. Students are still paying an excessive amount of money for a book that they will most likely only use for a semester.
And on top of that, once they sell it back, many students have found themselves getting a small amount of money back from the large amount they spent. Though this may not be the biggest issue on our student government’s plate, this is still an issue that needs to be dealt with.
Being proactive about this will show the university that this is something that needs to be aided.
With a high tuition, it’s not right to be forced to pay a high cost in textbooks too.
This project will hopefully get the student body involved and ignite the fire in them to speak out against expensive textbooks.
We need alternatives to simply shelling out hundreds of dollars each year. UPUA is heading in the right direction with a project such as this one.
And in order for this to be pushed further, the students need to get involved and actually give their input.
A project like this can only succeed with everybody — students, UPUA and the administration — working together to figure out a better way for students to spend less on textbooks.
This campaign needs some teeth to it, and the teeth are the students.
If you don’t want to keep spending hard-earned money, then make your voice heard.
