If there is one thing that all college students hate with a fiery passion, it is the astronomical price of textbooks and access codes. Seeing that a book or access code is “required” for a class and ordering it is the saddest part of my semester, for sure. Though I understand the need for supplemental texts and homework to aid in learning, I feel the the overwhelming use of access codes in classes represents a teaching defect. If a class requires a $100-$150 access code in order to learn the concepts, I think teaching capability should come into question.
Access codes are a way for professors to assign homework and practice materials that can be graded entirely online. The ease and convenience of this method is not lost on me. Students can do homework online without the professor physically grading it, which seems like a great idea. However, the downsides for students far outweigh the upsides for professors. Students are forced to pay an additional $150 for an access code along with the other required physical textbooks for each class they take. This can easily add up to spending around $500 solely on access codes each semester.
So, students could spend half a grand to pass classes that already cost a fortune in tuition to take, solely for the purpose of making a paid professor’s grading easier.
The whole system is an obvious scam, but students are stuck in this legally corrupt system in hopes of getting their degrees. The most guilty thieves in this system are the textbook companies that have monopolies over the online access code industries and set expensive prices, but that is the way of business.
In some cases, the ones who support the greedy textbook companies are the professors or schools who continually force students to buy them. Instead of coming up with their own methods of issuing homework and teaching the curriculum for students, they take the easy route of access codes. To ever change the prices that textbook companies place on access codes, there needs to be an extreme drop in sales. This calls for a boycott of them at large universities like USC.
Though $500 may not seem like a lot on top of tuition that costs tens of thousands of dollars, students or families who are already struggling with the sizable bills for housing and tuition may not be able to cross that final hurdle for textbooks. The fact is that students feel they are set for classes and have the financial aspect figured out until getting to class and realizing that professors are requiring several additional materials. Many budget for textbooks, but more and more, classes require access codes, iClicker accounts and other expenses in addition.
In my opinion, college is one of the largest scams known to man, but most people bow their heads and ignore the signs in order to get a degree and find a stable job because it seems like the only way. Gordon Wadsworth, author of The College Trap says, “ … if the cost of college tuition was $10,000 in 1986, it would now cost the same student over $21,500 if education had increased as much as the average inflation rate but instead education is $59,800 or over 2 ½ times the inflation rate.”
I know there are not many things I can change about the costs of university, but one thing that people should make more noise about is the ability to avoid textbooks. More and more professors are becoming aware that students can not afford textbooks, so they are finding cheaper options to teach with. The challenge now should be placed on professors to find ways to erase the burden of access codes for students. They did not always exist, but somehow students still learned.