Imagine being a student who lives right off campus and is getting ready for a new semester. You have no car because you are a poor college student. You sit down at your computer and go to the BYU website to look up your book list. Luckily, you live very close to campus, so you head out with your book list and your credit card. You enter the bookstore and go up the ominous stairs to brave the mass chaos of students and books and pushing and shoving. After a few deep breaths you begin to find the correct books but you have to reach over three other people to grab each one. You stand in line for over ten minutes and then the nice lady at the checkout counter scans all of your books. The total is completely outrageous! If you use your credit card for your books you will not have enough money for groceries for the month. Yet what other choice do you have? You have no car, so no way to go to a nearby bookstore, and you cannot order your books online because you need them for your classes that begin in two days. Looks like your parents will get a phone call asking for money. The BYU Bookstore is a huge monopoly, and monopolies just happen to be illegal. I think the bookstore needs to lower its prices so that it is not taking advantage of the BYU students.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Another factor is the number of professors that require unnecessary things. I'm disappointed by the number of professors I've seen requiring books that they themselves are invested in. That's the academic equivalent of insider trading - ALSO illegal!
The bookstore offers prices much lower than bookstores at other universities and provides a generous sell back opportunity. Often, the price of a book is not dictated by the book store but rather the publisher of the book.
I totally agree with you Nicole, and I really liked the way you set it up with the imagery. But what is your plan of action? What can we do to change this?
Hey your opinion editorial is similar to mine! I agree with you, however, I find that many of these prices cannot be taken down or reduced because, as Kyle said, many times it is the publisher who decides the price and not the book store. That being said, I also agree with Sean that it is a bit ridiculous that some professors require us to get books that they themselves wrote, and so therefore they are gaining profit from our sale. I agree with you that this is an issue... but the question is how are we going to resolve it?
A note on Sean's comment--be careful making that argument too strongly, because a lot of professors don't actually make money from their book contributions, and other times they wrote the book because they felt all the other available books were completely inadequate at addressing the subject matter.
I'm not sure how well your opening hook story would be accepted by the readers of the Daily Universe that would actually be able to make changes--an administrator might find it simply whiny. Try to think about an administrator's perspective, think about the reasons the bookstore has for charging the prizes they do. Then think specifically about not what it would take for a student to agree with you, but what would actually make the bookstore lower it's prizes. Also, you may want to consider that nothing forces you to buy books in the bookstore--there's the BYU book exchange, you can buy them online, etc.
I think this is a really important argument that needs to be made. I agree--the bookstore charges too much. Just think about the specific readers who will be able to make changes as you write.
Post a Comment