According to the National Association for College Stores, the average college student will spend $655 on books per year. And while that’s steep enough as it is, there are some students forced to shell out $300 plus on a single book, depending on their chosen field of study.

That average is at non-profit schools. Students enrolled at colleges and universities that are for-profit tend to spend more than that.

In an article published by U.S. News & World Report, there was a break-down of the costs of books—roughly only a fifth of the profits actually go to the stores the books are sold in, while more than three-fourths of the profits go back to the publisher.

Add-ons like CD programs and software continue to drive prices up along with the issuance of new editions, regardless of new material.

All of these things would be managable if the text book was used regularly. What most students can’t stomach is buying these over priced pieces of tree bark to use them for the first week of classes and then toss them in a dark corner to forget them for the rest of the semester.

Too many instructors require books that are used a handful of times only to be discarded within a few weeks. While not every student enrolled needs to have their financial aid jingling in their pockets, no student should be paying for supplies not used.

There are many students who do need every penny of their financial aid. There are plenty of students with less-than-stable financial standings and each of those $80-150 books could be bags of groceries or part of rent payment.

So to the instructors who utilize the internet and ebooks, we do appreciate it. Try to talk your coworkers into making the switch…

Information courtesy of Huffington Post