Why Do College Students Accept The Bookstore Monopoly?

College students have long been plagued by the a course in miracles bookstore at Universities. The average college student is incredibly broke, we rely on student loans, money from parents or our own meager incomes while we attempt to pay our tuition, room and board, and save pennies to relieve stress on Friday or Saturday night.

Money is always tight for a college student. There is usually nothing, or at best a measly salary of a couple hundred dollars a week that the average student is expected to live off of while they focus on school. Students struggle with money on a daily basis while in school, and it has always frustrated me – as a fiscally struggling student – that the University furthers this at least 4 times a year, when I am forced to purchase textbooks for my classes at the beginning of the semester and when I am then forced to take a fraction of the a course in miracles bookstore original purchase price at the end of the semester.

What makes this more frustrating, and if you are selling your textbooks back to the bookstore, please don’t do this to your self, but if you look at what the bookstores offer you for a textbook and then look at what the “used” book is selling for, you will be shocked. Last semester, I sold a law textbook back, a book I had purchased for $145 in the fall, only to be offered $45 when I tried to sell it back. I had used it for less than 5 months and only highlighted some of the more important topics. The unfortunate happened though, when I saw the bookstore was selling that same book as “used” to other students at the price of $115.

I have heard the argument that bookstores need to recover their profits and it is a risk, but every semester (and I’ll admit, I always register late for class), I have rarely been able to find a used textbook to purchase from the bookstore and usually end up purchasing brand new books – many of which the bookstores refuse to purchase from me at the end of the semester. In any other industry, this type of monopoly would not be allowed to persist, however, for some reason college students just accept this fate and allow the bookstores to profit off of them. I have been complaining this entire article, but I don’t want to just sit here and complain.

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