[goldstategop]

In my day, a textbook for a course cost around $60 and for four classes, it really added up. It must be several times that now and the thing is since textbooks are sold in bulk, they should be cheaper than ordinary books. Then again, the university bookstore market is a very strange beast, indeed.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Hyzenthlay]

I’m in college now, and I’ve been ‘lucky’ in that my textbook costs have been $300-400 per semester so far, because it’s not uncommon to see students spending $500-700 on textbooks each semester. Fortunately, the same book is the textbook for all three calculus classes (they cover about a third of the book each), and my humanities classes have been mostly working with paperbacks that are $10-20 on Amazon, and movies that are available through Netflix, so that massively cuts down on costs.

[ottbmare]

In my day, a textbook for a course cost around $60 and for four classes, it really added up. It must be several times that now

In my day, textbooks cost about $150 per academic quarter in undergraduate classes, but of course far more when I got to graduate school and started buying medical books. The advantage of investing in those medical texts is that some of them remain on my bookshelf and are used, lo, these many years later.

Recently my daughter has been spending $800 per semester, and that was a reduced number since she bought used books on Amazon. And as someone else remarked, she rarely used the texts. The relevant material for the course was always in lectures and online.