Textbooks shouldn’t be mandatory in college

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Textbooks should not be mandatory in college
Every year a repeat of the same scenario occurs to students in college: juggling between tuition and other college fee bills and lists of pricey required textbooks. Apart from the huge expenses incurred in purchasing the required list of textbooks, students may wonder whether their professors shall follow closely the textbooks, or whether they are really needed. However, college students are mostly worried because the costs of the textbooks that have risen lately to an alarming rate. According to GAO study (6), college students have faced rising costs of textbooks by almost eighty-two percent in eleven years, which is from 2002 to 2013. With the rapid increases in the prices of textbooks should be persuasive enough to warrant a declaration that textbooks should not be mandatory in college.
Textbooks are a complete waste of the student’s valuable money and do not merit their purchase. PIRG (13) established that the textbooks costs could deter college students from buying the books at all and even affect their choices of classes. Moreover, a result from the survey indicated that a majority of the people decided against buying the textbooks were concerned that they could affect their grades in the course, while another slim majority decided against purchasing of books, as they believed that the price tag for the books was a sufficient deterrence. College students have nowadays devised ingenious ways of tackling the high cost of textbooks.

Often, the students wait until the class commences before making a decision on whether to buy the required textbook or not.
The students go the professor’s class on the first day and assess whether they consider the textbooks have even been recommending. In a way, the students weigh the pros versus the cons of acquiring the textbook, often the cost of the textbook is included as part of the list of cons.
Typically, college students can resell their used textbooks to other students new to a unit or even back to the bookstore. Nevertheless, this has recently become challenging, when they have to accept with the online access codes. The codes expire, which implies that the student can only key-in the codes for a particular period. Obviously, there is no textbook worth its value without the access codes. Hence it will force students that are new to the units to obtain a new one. Hence, it is difficult for other students to resell their books, and for others to find used ones. Moreover, for the core courses or the introductory ones, the entrée keys can only be entered in for a particular period, say a semester, and then they expire.
When more textbook producers are gliding towards the development of the online part, then the keys should not run out. When students have a long period of entry, then it can be beneficial as they can access the textbook online, take a test that reviews the chapters of the book, and generally use all the attributes to be involved with the book. Having such an entry should not be at the cost of recouping part of the amount used in purchasing the books. Moreover, textbooks should not be mandatory in college because when students purchase a textbook, often, they let it gather dust in their lockers, or the book does not serve as their resource for extracting materials relevant for lessons. Most students in the present age do not rely on textbooks. It may be read only for short period of time, probably a skim through on the first week of the semester, then transferred almost permanently to the bottom of the backpack.
When students do not understand a concept, they just search through the information using the internet, rather than take a lot of time flipping through the pages of the textbook looking for the information. The impact of the ubiquity of Google, and by extension the internet, in learning is undeniable, as it has emerged as a faithful companion in learning and research, and is gradually replacing the traditional dependencies on textbooks as sole sources of information and knowledge. Modern information technology has given students the internet, which in turn has created newer ways of seeking and accessing knowledge. The internet has provided modern college students access to a glut of information at a cheap cost practically on their fingertips (Andrejevic 12). Although their concerns on its potential downsides, the benefits from the having such an immediate and instant access to information that only is available in billions of pages of textbooks is all too glaring.
With an accurate and fair precision, a student can locate the information on very specific topics (Maurer 49). This has reduced the need to return to the encyclopedia or even in the dictionary, or even troop to the library in pursuit or research for a certain literature that answers a lingering question. Moreover, students do not need a perceptible experience or paging through the textbooks. Critics on the reliance on the internet to access information claim that it has a considerable effect on the manner in which people think, and which is not necessarily positive (Carr 355). They claim that the instant and precise access to information through the internet makes the mind to be lazy, but textbooks make students work hard in gaining knowledge. Moreover, students who rely on the internet for knowledge are more prone to forgetfulness, because information is located very fast and read faster (Brockman 44).
They point out that students who rely on the internet are not even compelled to recall what they have read because the information is stored on the palms of their hands. However, when one relies on the textbook for knowledge, they seem to be taking greater effort in learning, and which shall then assist them in lodging the memories in mind, since accessing information from a textbook might not be as easy a simple Google search using certain keywords. When a student relies on technology, the student misses the experience of the book.
It is interesting that the critics on the use of modern technology by college students in accessing information are the same people who are probably benefitting from the wonderful human invention.
It is incorrect for them to point out that the current generation of college students who rely on the internet for their class work shall have the minds of mush. The critics of the reliance on the internet are definitely underestimating the capacity of the human mind in capturing, and capitalizing on the newfound ways of thinking and learning. Just as the printing press changed how human used and collected information, it should not be in doubt that the internet shall be used as the college students’ new frontier to learn, thwarting the need to buy unnecessary and costly textbooks.
Work Cited
Andrejevic, Mark. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. , 2013. Print.
Brockman, John. Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. Print.
GAO. “College Textbooks: Students Have Greater Access to Textbook Information.” GAO 6 June 2013. Web. 6 December 2016.
Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google making us stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.” The Composition of Everyday Life, Concise (2015): 355.
Maurer, Hermann. “Does the internet make us stupid?.” Communications of the ACM 58.1 (2015): 48-51.
PIRG. “Fixing The Broken Textbook Market: How Students Respond to High Textbook Costs and Demand Alternatives.” USPIRG. January 2014. Web. December 2016