High textbook cost has students playing lotto in bookstore

LAURA VAN DE PETTE NEWS EDITOR LCV722@CABRINI EDU

The bookstore at Cabrini College is bursting with activity and the cash register is no slouch either. Many students are continuing to fork up the big bucks while a new trend shows students are refusing to purchase textbooks and are risking failing a class to save cash.

Students wind their way through the cramped space holding stacks of books three feet high with their knuckles white from the heavy weight of the pristine textbooks.

Many students try to add-up the price of their textbooks in their head while the maze-like line inches forward to the register of doom. Just how much will all this cost?

With textbook prices soaring, and fewer used editions in circulation, students are bearing the brunt of expensive books. But many students are bypassing the aisles of textbooks and grabbing a candy bar and Coke for $2.25 rather than the biology book they need for class that will set them back $152.

As students come back to campus and get their spring semester assignments, many will pause in the bookstore and make a choice. They can buy everything on the syllabus or take a chance.

L iz Wackerle, a junior health and excercise science major, said, “Unless you find some good bargains, the price students pay for textbooks, especially the ones not needed for their major is unnecessarily high.”

Textbook prices have been rising at double the rate of i nflation for the past two decades, according to a Government Accountability Office study. In a nationwide study, 40 percent of students surveyed by the State Council of Higher Education said they sometimes just do without.

“That’s been increasing,” said Jennifer Libertowski of the National Association of College Stores; recently, the group found that nearly 60 percent of students nationwide choose not to buy all the course materials,” as reported in the Washington Post.

Textbook prices almost tripled from 1986 to 2004, the Government Accountability Office report found, in large part because of the increasing cost of developing the materials that now often come with

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‘Dead Man Walking’ author to speak Monday

Sister Helen Prejean began her prison ministry in 1981 when she dedicated her life to the poor of New Orleans. While living in the St. Thomas housing project, she became pen pals with Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers, sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison.

Upon Sonnier’s request, Sister Helen visited him repeatedly as his spiritual adviser. In doing so, her eyes were opened to the Louisiana execution process. Sister Helen turned her experiences into a book that not only made the 1994 American Library Associates Notable Book List, it was also nominated for a 1993 Pulitzer Prize. “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of