PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Students Fed Up with New Editions
by Janine Rectenwald Wednesday, Dec. 03, 2003 at 4:01 PM
beann210@hotmail.com 724-942-5062

New editions of text books are taking a chunk out of students wallets and they don't see any return for their money. The books they buy a few months before are obsolite as soon as new editions are issued!

Many schools in Pennsylvania are ordering new editions of text books yearly and sometimes semi-yearly and are causing students to pay larger sums of money to get the newer edition. Students don’t get anything in return when they go to sell the books because they aren’t the correct book for the class

This semester alone students at Point Park College spent approximately $400 to $500 for their books, many of which went unused. This scenario is fundamentally the same across Pennsylvania, with students at Washington and Jefferson College, the University of Pittsburgh, Slippery Rock University and Penn State University all complaining that new editions are taking a hefty chunk out of their paychecks for reasons that escape them.

“New Editions are just the same book with better pictures,” said Colin Arbes, a senior Psychology and Sociology major at Washington and Jefferson College.

The big problem occurs when students who have purchased their books a few months before go to sell the books back to the school’s bookstore and they find they cannot because the book has been upgraded or the teacher is no longer requiring that particular book.

At Point Park College in downtown Pittsburgh, students who pay $400 to $500 estimate they will receive about $80 when they return their books. The cause for this dramatic decline in returned cash is new editions.

“They really hurt my bank account because they are still as expensive and you always have to buy new because there are no used,” said Jeremy Clark, a junior and Management Information Systems major at Penn State University. “However on the other hand, they keep the examples updated to current times which makes the reading more interesting and helps my school work.”

In some classes, it is wise to have up to the minute books to teach and learn from. Courses such as Political Science, Computer Information systems, and Media classes all use books that would be obsolete if the professors and authors were not constantly updating the material. However, students in Pennsylvania are encountering new edition updates in courses like History, Art, and English that have books which are being branded “out of date” and the new editions are ordered when the material doesn't seem to need constant up dates.

Colleges all over Pennsylvania would reduce the stress, reduce the strain on their students bank accounts, and raise moral of their campuses if the administration evaluated how much students really gain versus how much they lose from constantly having to buy new editions.

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