Emily Lang
Within education, textbooks often add not only physical weight to students’ backs, but also a financial weight (as if the recent rising tuition rates weren’t enough). To solve part of this issue, Penn State has developed a new solution.
Lionpath, the university’s system for students’ academics, recently added a new search option for courses with low- or no-cost required textbooks.
To find this search option, a student could just log in to their Lionpath account, go to the class search, and under “Additional Search Criteria,” click on the “Required Text Cost” option. Underneath that, in “Course Attribute Value,” two options will open up for either low- (meaning under $50) or no- cost required text.
Thomas Eisenmann, a third-year student at Penn State Abington, can see the potential benefits of this new function, particularly for students whose choices in college are affected by the monetary costs that a class could bring.
“If you can find classes that are required that you don’t have to buy something for, then that’s great. If you don’t have the money for certain things at that time, then you can go, ‘okay, so I’ll take these classes now, and I’ll save up money for the other ones later,’ so it applies a bit of a different sort of sorting strategy to it, all in all.”
Eisanmann notes that this new function will not solve all the issues of costly textbooks, pointing out that, “you need the classes you need.”
“I don’t like spending a lot of money on art classes, but I need the materials for it, so I’m gonna take the class if I need to take it.”
He concludes, “I think it’s a neat thing to do, but I don’t think it’ll necessarily have a large impact of going like, ‘oh, I have to buy a textbook for this class? I’m just not gonna take this one.’ If you need it, you need it.”
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