Monash’s Textbook Behaviour

University is expensive.

News flash: annual fees for a Bachelor of Marketing are $8,300. That’s over a $1,000 per unit. Which means you pay almost $350 a week for your education.

I think my figures are on the money, well after paying so much to take statistics (twice) you’d hope so.

But who cares? It all goes on HECS anyway. Our generation is so trigger happy with the concept of credit. We know debt is bad but that’s for our future high-paid and better dressed selves to deal with. Right?

Unfortunately this article does not hold any magical keys to unlocking yourself from HECS debt. Though there are the classics of:

- Travel overseas for a few years, return home and get yourself a new tax-file number.

Or

- Never earn over $41,500 a year.

Your long-term university debts are what they are. However every year students are consistently wasting around a thousand dollars…on textbooks. Book prices may vary unit to unit, but lets face it they’re not cheap.

But surely you must buy the prescribed textbook at the campus bookstore, right? Wrong. But it says ‘must have’ in my unit outline….

One of the most symbolic and clichéd images of university is the Library. Libraries are filled with books! Well, somebody had to be ‘Captain Obvious’. Currently, ‘prescribed textbooks’ are sitting on shelves collecting dust.

There are a limited number of copies, but the number of students borrowing them seems to be even more limited. Also why do students have blinkers on when it comes to textbooks? There is more than one book on, say ‘Buyer Behaviour’ than the one prescribed in your unit outline. These aren’t novels with unique stories; they’re well studied and published subject matters. Different doesn’t mean they’re pirated from Thailand where some have pages are missing or written in a different language. Exam questions don’t come from one a specific author/textbook and neither does an education.

Yet students insist on trading hundreds of dollars for prescribed texts. A select few have some initiative and buy and sell second hand. An army of people before you have taken the same subjects; do you think they all want to keep their textbooks? Sure sometimes you’re supposed to have a newer edition. But publishers bring out new editions of textbooks more regularly than Michael Jackson’s changed his face (rest his soul).

Here’s a secret, a new edition generally means; a new cover, a few different photos, and slightly varied layout. That’s the difference in paying full price at the bookstore and buying one off a fellow student for 50% less. . Though I must say that ‘Monash Market Place’ looks like something out of the Windows DOS era.

First years don’t even know where the books in the lirary are. Let alone where to buy second hand copies. They’re too busy undertaking units like BBEG101: Beer Bong Engineering and PCD125: Introduction to Pub Crawling Dynamics. That’s fair enough, but by second year students should know better.

Monash is supposedly harbouring the future top guns of the marketing industry.

We’re supposed to be the best. The kind of graduates that can sell a cat to a mouse and then get it to come back for the tiger upgrade in 6 months on a loyalty program.

Hundreds of students buy the same textbook each semester. Nobody’s considered that if we all bought them together (straight from the Publisher) of the savings we’d make. Logistical nightmare: maybe. Bulk Buying discount: priceless.

Lets Just Say That

There’s nothing Top Gun about our textbook buying behaviour, though the word ‘Goose’ does come to mind.