By Staff Editorial
By Staff Editorial
In the first weeks of any semester, there is always stress for Riverside City College students.
Many show up on campus wondering if they will get into the classes they desire, how long they will last driving around the parking lots to find a parking spot and where the money will come from to pay for their classes.
Another issue that causes stress for students at the beginning of semesters is how they are going to afford their textbooks.
After RCC students pay for their classes, parking permit and other supplies, their wallet has nothing but a handful of $1 bills, and the panic of how they are going to get their books comes into play.
As soon as the first class session is over, many professors assign readings and homework assignments that are due at the next class session, and students scramble like headless chickens trying to come up with the book they need.
Many decide to skip buying the textbook and print out photocopies of each page, but in a span of a semester, the cost of those copies add up to the total cost of the book if they were to buy it in the first place.
Others borrow a classmate’s textbook for a few hours but that is not a good idea because at some point in the semester that classmate is going to get stingy and is going to need the textbook to study for midterms and finals.
A large group of students rent or buy textbooks from websites like Chegg and Amazon, but the only problem is that these textbooks take two to three weeks until they are delivered and by then the students are behind in their classes.
And the last few who do not want to deal with all the hassle head to the Bookstore on campus to buy their textbook.
Although textbooks seem to be expensive no matter where a student buys them, there might be some other ways to deal with the issue.
Textbooks are needed and there is no way of getting around the problem, so RCC students need to come together to help one another out.
There is one method some students do already—they go to the class they took the previous semester and auction off their textbooks to the new students enrolled in that class.
Another method is that some students post fliers around campus advertising what textbooks they are selling.
And even though those might be good ideas, many other students are not aware of those advertisements.
What RCC students need to do is something like a book exchange fair where there is a designated area where students can go and exchange textbooks amongst themselves.
Some RCC students have taken this approach online and created a Facebook fan page called “RCC books,” where students can post the textbooks they have for sale or the textbooks they are looking to purchase.
This method was popular for a lot of RCC students on MySpace but not anymore since MySpace is nonexistent now.
The bottom line is as long as there are classes that require textbooks, students need to acquire them, so if the student body can work with each other to make life easier for each other then textbooks won’t be a stress.