The costs of textbooks at the Cerritos College bookstore are way too expensive. Not only for the financially strained students, but seemingly for the financially comfortable students as well.

As students, we don’t have to simply grin and bare it. We don’t have to just accept excessively high prices for textbooks that we need for our classes.

The campus bookstore does have a rental program that allows students to rent textbooks for use for the semester at a lower cost than for what it would cost to buy a new or even a used textbook, but that option is only available for some books.

We live in the technological age and as such, other means of shopping for our books is only a click away.

Students can use tools such as Google shopping, which is a tool located in the Google search engine that allows people to search specifically for things that they want to buy and lets customers compare prices in one place.

There are also other options such as students around campus that are constantly selling their books.

However, the blame is not specifically on our campus bookstore. They are not the people that set the price of the books. That blame would be on the book publisher.

An argument can be made on any potential mark up in pricing once the bookstore inventories the book to sell but it is a business and as such should make a profit.

The issue is that this problem with the price of books on campus is not only limited to students. Professors feel the strain as well.

Knowing full well that the price of books is out of control, professors are faced with a dilemma to either require cheaper textbooks that will save the students money, but very possibly lack a good portion of the necessary material needed to pass the class.

Also, professors can choose to require the more expensive books which best assist them in educating students but risk students dropping the class or failing because they opted to not buy the textbook.

The student’s goal should be to complete the classes that are required in order to either graduate or transfer, but a lot of students are in essence forced to take classes that require a textbook that is affordable rather than take classes that will lead to that student’s particular educational goal.

The Cerritos College administration and faculty pushes and motivates students to work toward graduation or transfer, but how can that be accomplished if as students, we can’t even afford the very books that are required to reach that goal that we are being so eagerly reminded that we need to accomplish?

If students consider other options for their textbooks, the bookstore is upset because we are taking money out of its pocket. If students focus on taking classes that have books that they can afford, the Cerritos College administration and faculty are upset because students aren’t working toward graduation and if students just accept that textbooks are expensive and deal with it, the students are upset because there is only so much financial aid to go around.

And what about the students that don’t receive financial aid? It should not be assumed that if some students do not qualify for financial aid, it is because they make plenty of money.

There are a lot of low income students that maybe qualify for a fee waiver, but not financial aid. Those students deserve the same opportunities to purchase decently priced textbooks as any other student.

The students have a voice and can speak out against the high price of books, but it would be nice to know that our school had our back.