When in the course of human events, our college bookstore becomes an unseemly way of taking more money from students — who already pay enough in taxes to be entitled to a free college education anyway — we the people should, without undue ceremony but with overdue common sense, close that college bookstore, as it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

That's right. Let's get rid of King George, slavery, and the Penn Valley Bookstore.

It's not that there's inherently anything evil about the good people who work at our Bookstore. PVCC should make every effort to re-train and re-employ them elsewhere without interruption.

What we're saying is that in order to generate revenue, the PVCC Bookstore is designed to take advantage of ignorance on the part of the very students Penn Valley is supposed to be educating.

How so? To make the money it does, our Bookstore depends on students who are unaware they can buy textbooks far cheaper by ordering them from independent Internet booksellers, or fellow students. The PVCC Bookstore buyback trap also offers students far less for their books than what they can be re-sold for on the Internet, or to other students.

(Did you know Penn Valley has a "classified" page on its website for student-to-student buying/selling? [http://classifieds.mcckc.edu/] Since hardly anyone's ever heard of it, hardly anyone uses it, not even school organizations who can post event notices there. There's a link to the PV Bookstore, but curiously, the Bookstore webpage has no link to the classifieds and never mentions them - wonder why?)

Bookstores should not inflate the costs of a college education

Meanwhile, The Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index shows that textbook prices are rising four times faster than the average for all other finished goods. Publishers commonly make minor revisions, then charge ever more for expensive new editions issued nearly every year.

So now that you're a rising star, you're supposed to buy the overdone clunkers and sell them back, because if you're empowered enough to have money, you're empowered enough to support the Great Textbook Racket, which in recent years has had great success milking the "let's-add-on-a-gratuitous-CD-to-boost-the-price" gimmick.

But remember the old grade school method, where your school bought textbooks, then loaned them to generations of students, without even charging rental fees?

The National Association of College Stores says there are actually 20 colleges in the US which rent textbooks, including Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau.

"Our University has always been a rental school," says Laurie Taylor, Assistant Manager for the SEMO Bookstore. "It's a great savings for the students. We charge $18.33 per course. The students who really know the saving are the ones who have attended other universities where they had to purchase their textbooks."

An October 3, 2007 Boston Globe article reports that even the Harvard University Bookstore has decided to automatically refer students needing textbooks to a student-run online service, that offers realistic low-cost alternatives.

The PVCC Bookstore should be closed because it needlessly inflates the cost of education. Students - not a middleman bookstore - should be advised in advance of the ISBNs for the books their courses will require, so the decision about how and if the books will be procured is left up to the students.

We say "if" the books will be be procured, because not only does the Bookstore operate on a fossilized business plan based on student ignorance: its primary commodity, textbooks, are themselves obsolete, especially at Penn Valley.

In fact most PVCC instructors, quietly sympathetic with the plight of students on budgets - as well as deeply skeptical of the value and reliability of many textbooks - already teach courses that can easily be aced without ever cracking the "required" text, as long as the student knows how to use the Internet to access knowledge, and how to interact with the teacher and classmates on Blackboard.

Why would anyone use a textbook nowadays? Certainly not to be up-to-date about any subject, or to write a paper, the most common graded assignment. Vastly more information, more current and usually from a variety of more informed sources, is freely available on the Internet. Using Google and other search engines, relevant content is found much easier online than by rifling through hundreds of pages of poorly-indexed hard copy.

All this and more - without wasting tons of trees and harsh chemicals to make heavy textbooks, which in turn force students to buy all kinds of dorky gear to tote them around with, which in turn is also available at the Bookstore.

Yet let the current Bookstore go, and the space can be rented out in stalls to students trading/buying/selling books and other academic bling, so the operation is properly of, by, and for students, instead of a means for fleecing them.

Wouldn't that be fun, educational, and interesting? Students taking care of themselves and their school supplies, instead of hiring grownups to mark up and sell the stuff to us?

Of course, a student-run market might not be the cash cow we've come to worship, and a few students could possibly wind up able to get by without the student loans PVCC also profits from.

We can only suggest that opening a small casino on campus next to the Francis Child Development Institute might be ethically on higher ground than keeping the Penn Valley Bookstore open. How about "The Augustine Adult Development Temptasino! - Home of KC's Loosest Slots"?

Editor's Note: Spectrum has learned that MCC is looking into some of the issues raised in this editorial. Spectrum will report on any future developments.

Tell us what you think. Write Spectrum at editor@mcckc.edu.

Copyright 2007 Metropolitan Community College