The Semester Has Begun

As most of you know, I teach at several area colleges, including HACC. (For those of you not from the area, "HACC" used to be Harrisburg Area Community College, but recently changed to simply HACC--Central Pennsylvania's Community College). This semester, HACC has over 21,000 students across our five campuses, with 5,024 in Lancaster alone!! The parking lot is crowded, the hallways are crowded, and classrooms are full!!

And the price of textbooks is climbing ever higher; the textbook that my CIS105 class uses is $145! While that includes a software license for the MyITLab product, that still represents an additional expense for which many students have not budgeted.

Are we not communicating with prospective students that the college experience is different than high school??? And college is an investment (remember anything about risk/reward???). An unmotivated dullard will use the finest of books as mere paperweights, while the Lincolns among us can educate themselves with borrowed books and a candle. But using the best tools available can help maximize the odds of a good "return" on the investment.

So yes, college & textbooks are expensive.

But an investment is a "good" investment when it increases the value of one's portfolio. Use the textbooks to increase the "value of YOUR portfolio," and in five years you'll never even think about the cost of the textbook.