Being a student can be tough on your finances, as tuition and living can be expensive. Most students rely on help from scholarships, Ontario Student Assistance Plan, parents, or a part-time job.
Textbooks are another expense, one often crucial to learning. For one semester I pay around $300, which is incredibly cheap (thanks, journalism and women’s and gender studies).
However, I have friends in engineering who have paid over $1,000. This is ridiculous considering tuition is already between $7,000-12,000 at Carleton, depending on your program.
Of course there are ways to save money—most students buy used, or buy off Amazon. Some don’t buy the textbook at all, or split it with a friend also in the class. Downloading texts to your Kindle or iBooks application is also another option.
However, what really annoys me is when I look through my course syllabus at the beginning of the year and see the professor has assigned their own textbook. Isn’t it somehow a conflict of interest, to make students buy a book the professor makes money on?
Professors have made me read their own published works three times: in two cases I had to buy the textbook, and once the journal articles were published on Ares. In all three cases, the resources definitely contributed to me doing well in the class—I was completely satisfied with the money I had spent. I also really liked those professors, so I don’t mean to attack them. For me, it is more the principle of the matter: students should not have to spend money on a textbook when its author is teaching them.
If the professor has researched something incredibly niche, then there might be some reasoning behind it. Perhaps there are not a lot of academic resources to choose from to teach. Perhaps they’re the leading expert in the field. Perhaps they, as the professor, are more comfortable speaking about their own work.
But in that case, why make students pay for it? Students are already strapped for cash. Do they really need to read from a book their professor wrote? In a way, they’re essentially paying twice for the same knowledge—once when they pay tuition to have access to the professor, and once when they buy their textbook. Professors could teach what they research in class, and assign readings that are related from other academics. Paying for both seems a bit redundant.
I mean, paying for textbooks full of readings seems a bit redundant overall when we all pay for our library to subscribe to a variety of resources, but I digress.
The solution isn’t simple, but one worth considering. Should Carleton create a policy preventing professors from making their students buy their books? If that were to happen, how would it be enforced, and what happens if they are the best resource? Should professors just think more critically about students lives and use library resources for their own works?
I’m not sure, but considering the financial strain already put on students, professors should try to alleviate that strain wherever they can.
