Ahhh, the hallowed halls of higher education, filling once again with hormones and expectation, attitude and angst. It’s back-to-school time (how bizarre is it that schools start at such radically different times from region to region, district to district. I know some kids have been in school for weeks, while when I was a kid, we got back after Labor Day. Does it make sense to anyone?) and for college students, it’s time to pay the piper. No, I don’t mean the tuition piper–he has already collected his enormous sums for this semester. Nor do I meant the meal plan piper, or the decorating your dorm room piper, not even the beer keg fund piper…I mean the campus bookstore/textbook piper. That laughing fiend who holds you as a captive retail slave, given no choice but to buy the massively overpriced books demanded by the wiles of each professor’s syllabus. Paper and binding cost the same for Introduction to Humanistic Psychology as they do for that copy of The Help you grabbed from the end-of-aisle display, yet the markup of textbooks is criminal. Often triple digit-priced, even the used copies are appallingly expensive.
There is no point in railing at the gods of academia. Your fate is sealed…BUT…you can do a little good while you are ponying up big bucks for learning. Textbooks4Change is a ramping up organizations started by poor college students and grads who thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if a percentage of these gargantuan @#*! textbook costs went to a good cause?” So they have made that possible. About 6% of the price of textbooks you buy through them goes directly, as a donation, to the charity you choose. As of now, the charity choices are terrific yet limited (The Courage Campaign, Special Delivery San Diego), but those are important dollars you can effortlessly give to important work…and it doesn’t cost you an extra dime. When you get your course list and book lists, click over to search via their several online retailers to see if, at no extra cost to you, you can put a few extra bucks in the coffers for change.
Change by Doing 