what a racket!

Going to college is a racket, and it doesn't get any less so the higher the degree you're going for.  It's a joke.  A scam.  A disgrace to the American business model.  Colleges do everything in their power to maintain absolute control over their student's every dollar and attempts to extradite that dollar by legitimate competition are often fought and regularly defeated.  And private schools are the worst offenders.  I'd managed to forget most of this since completing my last degree but since I'm now going back for my 3^rd degree at my 3^rd institution of higher learning, it's all coming back to me and it generally ticks me off.

 

Take textbooks, for example.  How can a school that publishes online a class list (with professor and course numbers), class room assignments, and first day of class reading assignments not manage to also publish online a lists of required texts for each class?  It's not like they don't know them, since the first day of class assignments refer to these books by author.  "For Contracts 1, read Smith & Hope, pp 1-15 and 30-47."  Smith & Hope what?  Maybe if Smith & Hope only collaborated on one Contracts book and there's only one set of Smith & Hope who've collaborated on a Contracts book I might be able to find the book by searching the Internet, but it shouldn't be that difficult.  They should just put the list online.  But NO, that might lead us to buying texts from somewhere other than the "official" school bookstore, thus spreading our $$'s at businesses other than the school, and that would be wrong and evil.  Instead, I have to physically visit the store to get a list, thus providing the lazy student the opportunity to just buy the books at a higher price, skip the whole price comparison shopping and pretty much guarantee the bookstore that they'd keep more of our money than if they just published the list.  Can't this be considered anti-competitive behavior?  Where's the DOJ?  They ought to leave Microsoft alone and go after schools and bookstores for hoarding information.  Then they can go after the professors, publishers, and schools who run the whole textbook scam anyways, but I won't get into professors who use their own texts to teach from and revise them each year.

 

Of course, my mother tells me that this is another opportunity for me to "build character" and that I should have a positive attitude about this.  I don't know about the rest of you, but at what point do you have enough character and no longer need any more?  I'm over 30 years old, for crying out loud!  How much more character is there for me to learn?  Haven't I learned enough already.  I've got a full time job at a regular company, I've bought a house, I've screwed up my personal finances, I've gone to college (twice), I've gotten married, I'm part of a dysfunctional family, and gone through many other opportunities to "build character".  I've had enough.  I don't want anymore.  Somebody stop the madness!

 

I suppose I'm delusional for thinking life ought to get easier, or at least start to make more sense at some point.  You'd think for $22k they'd just throw the textbooks in.  I mean, what's a couple hundred bucks a semester amongst friends?  They should be delivered to my house with my first bill and/or class schedule along with the relevant commercial outlines and flashcards.  While I'm at it, laptops should also be included as an option at a reasonable one time fixed price or a per semester/academic year charge.  Okay, I'll snap out of it and get back to the reality of dealing with all this crap, but hope that someday this will all become easier and less of a hassle than it is today.  Until that time, here's to "building character"!