Sticker Shock

Wow...

Today I decided to price my textbooks for the upcoming semester. The University of Baltimore has this really cool feature for the bookstore that allows you to enter your courses and it will automatically generate the reading list, and has of course an option to "Buy All."

I was a Psychology major with a minor in History in undergrad, but Loyola has a large "core" of courses that all must take, meaning you take almost two full years of classes outside of your major. So I took the hard sciences, the soft sciences, the classics, humanities, writing, computer classes, some art, all of it. Additionally, Loyola is a famously expensive school. And yet I never remember spending more than $300 per semester on books.

$928.44.

Yes.

That is my total for this semester, even after checking the "Used if available" boxes.

I have no idea what I am going to do about this. I guess I will be getting a job a lot sooner, and for a lot more hours, than I had originally planned.

On a funny/horrific note, the bookstore does, ever so sneakily, add in Sparkcharts for all your courses automatically. Sparkcharts? Like those laminated Sparknotes pages? From high school? Seriously? Perhaps they can also recommend some good SAT prep books while they are at it.

Also, this price caused me to spend about 6 hours scouring the internet for used books. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and even Ebay had only two, and for only a few dollars cheaper than the bookstore. Although Barnes and Noble can be explained, as my school bookstore is actually administered by Barnes and Noble, so there might be a conflict of interest there. I even tried Craigslist...

Wow, so I guess for my closing question, does anyone want to donate some money to this poor soul? Or, more seriously, is this common for law school, or just 1L, or just first semester?