Paying $400 per semester on college textbooks is a crime. We hear from students all the time how frustrated they are for having to spend an arm and a leg for their textbooks for college. If your bookstore is unwilling to purchase back the textbooks you paid good money for last semester, here are some handy tips on textbook buyback for online colleges.

• Textbook Buyback with BigWords.com. Not only can you save a bundle on your college textbooks at Big Words, you can also sell them back, getting on average 80% of your initial purchase price back in your hot little hands. You also have the option to donate your used textbooks to Better World Books.
• Textbook Buyback with BookScouter.com. Book Scouter helps you get the best buy-back price on your books, scouring 40 different book-buying sites and effectively doing the work for you. Their site is free, no registration is required, and the service provided will save you the time and headache of doing it yourself.
• Textbook Buyback with BarnesandNoble.com. Even the big boys are getting in on the textbook selling action, allowing the average college student to get cash back on their books fast. It’s easy, you enter in an ISBN number, they provide a quote for how much they’ll give you, and should you accept they’ll send you a label to ship the book back and send you a check once the book is received.
• Textbook Buyback with eCampus.com. One great thing about eCampus is that you can get paid fast through direct deposit, or can get a credit towards your eCampus account with a 5% bonus for next semester’s textbooks. If you’re concerned that your highlighting and notes in the margin will prevent you from selling your books back, think again!
• Textbook Buyback with eTextShop.com. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that college bookstores just don’t give full value when buying back textbooks. Get great rates with no out-of-pocket expenses from eTextShop. Their students actually prefer books that are highlighted since it helps them cut to the chase and source out the good stuff.

For students concerned about saving the planet, reselling and buying used textbooks as well as attending online colleges are great ways to go green.

Since it’s the beginning of the semester for many traditional and online colleges, if you want a place to buy discounted textbooks online, all of these websites sell textbooks as well. For more textbook buying resources, check out Where to Find School Textbooks Online.

Go Green. Source: Green Schools Initiative

On April 22, the planet celebrates Earth Day and looks for ways to become more earth-conscious and leave a smaller carbon footprint. By searching #EarthDay on Twitter, we saw lots of creative ways people have to go green on Earth Day:

1. Watch Earth Day related movies like 2012, the 11th Hour, Pocahontas. We added Avatar, Fern Gully and An Inconvenient Truth to the list
2. Take “Power Showers” and switch off the water when your soaping/shampooing
3. Save water by showering with someone
4. Recycle old electronics and computers and even gadgets. Would you wear a recycled cassette tape necktie, or use a rubber tire laptop sleeve?
5. And our personal favorite: raise free-range children

One way you may not have considered to go green is to engage in online education. Whether you’re a student pursuing a college education, or a working professional improving your qualifications for increased opportunities, online education is a terrific solution. Not only does online education give you the freedom and flexibility to work/live/tweet, online education is another way to go green.

The commute… or lack thereof

Imagine waking up, rolling out of bed, and commuting to the living room for your Psychology 101 class. Does that sound like the type of commute you could live with? Online education allows students to further their education anywhere they have internet access. Whether that is the break room at work, the community library, or the cafe in France you landed a job at while living abroad, online education comes to you.

Energy conservation

A traditional campus, with it all its classrooms, lecture halls, labs, and offices, use electricity and energy to light, heat, and cool the premises all year round, not to mention manpower to supervise, secure, and landscape the premises. Colleges in the U.S. put $2 billion per year into energy on campus according to the EPA. Your online classroom is you and your laptop. That’s a lot of energy saved.

Save the trees

Instead of printing handouts, assignments, and projects, online education allows teachers and students to communicate through an online blackboard and via email. Assignments can be turned in through an attachment in an email, rather than a double spaced, single sided printed copy, saving paper, trees, and ink. Since 1 billion trees worth of paper are discarded every year, imagine how many trees would be saved through the paper preservation with online education.

The e-book alternative

Instead of investing hundreds of dollars each semester in textbooks you’ll only use once, e-books are a green alternative. If any new editions are released, rather than printing a whole new edition, the e-book can digitally be updated.

While Earth Day reminds us of our collective responsibility to preserve the planet, investing in an online education will help you to go green everyday.

It seems like many of the local colleges I see are building more buildings and the campuses seem to be getting larger and larger even though they are still cutting budgets. I know that there are many advantages to both students and the communities which these colleges reside, but let’s take another perspective. Let’s take the perspective of investing in individual students instead of the college campuses and keeping education green.

Article Index

Campus Buildings | Parking Lots | Emissions | Paperless Books | Arguments | Two Cents

Campus Buildings

These large buildings that are built on the campus consume a lot of electricity and require the consumption of many natural resources when being built. I know many new buildings now a days are being built with recycled material and try and capture the sunlight to bring in power and heat, but I’m sure there are many other ways that they impact the environment.

What if we could use the money that would have been spent on those buildings to make all the homes in the community that university resides more eco friendly. Installing solar power on every roof top, converting cars to natural gas, etc. No matter if the buildings are built or not, the homes the students live in will still be there.

If our students are learning online we should invest in their individual classrooms at home and help them get the technology they need to access all the information we have for them to learn.

[ top ]

Parking Lots

I know when I drive past the universities and campuses, I’m amazed at how much space is required just to park all the cars. How much land of potentially fertile soil was polluted with petroleum and tar filled asphalt just so we could park our cars. Think about the enormous footprint that university parking lots make.

I’ve looked into just replacing my driveway at home and was blown away at how much it was going to cost me to relay it. Imagine the expense in clearing the snow, keeping it repaired, etc. I think you get my point. Yet more money that could be saved or used to invest in the individual student’s education.

[ top ]

Transportation / Emissions

I understand the idea of close college housing which makes complete sense and my next argument is the obvious one of commuting. How many students commute? My previous argument about parking lots wouldn’t make sense if people still didn’t drive to school. We wouldn’t have talked about parking lots. Most colleges have done good by running shuttles across town and around the various college housing complexes but this doesn’t help the people not living on campus or near campus.

How much money could be saved on gas when you don’t have to go up to the university every night after work and work in a lab with other students after having gone to school that morning. There is a lot of gas consumed just in your common commute. How many college kids drive brand new, smart, clean, green running cars? I know most my friends and I had old beaters that were patched up and barely passing emissions.

I think by allowing the students to access class online we help eliminate a lot of the emission issues and help eliminate the need for parking lots and buildings. Celebrities can buy carbon credits to make up for the huge footprints their private jets make and all their various homes they own, why not reward students for studying at home and not actually creating a footprint. You get a tax discount for driving hybrids, why isn’t online education considered the hybrid of education? Why don’t students get a tax credit and a government grant for studying online?

Join the discussion on Celsias.

[ top ]

Paperless Books

Another obvious advantage to online / digital education is the lack of printing that goes on. If a student has all digital class books then the expense goes down and the paper consumption also goes down. This eliminates a lot of material management and also editing. If a change needs to be made with the class materials it is made and all the information is updated without having to reprint.

Education Reform: Let’s start by burning all the textbooks

[ top ]

Arguments

I’ve heard all the arguments. Some of the people that are going to complain are most likely already employed by or know someone employed by the colleges. Some students want to move away and have the whole college experience. Some students love driving their cars around town. Well there’s always going to be opposition, but let’s think about what’s best for our environment. Let’s think about what creates the most opportunity for current students and people that wouldn’t be students otherwise.

There would be jobs that would be lost like maintenance jobs, landscaping jobs, janitorial jobs, even faculty jobs if we pushed online courses. I know that some colleges have been laying off faculty and increasing class size because of the economy. Right now it makes sense to make these changes. It would motivate a more intelligent work force and create more opportunities for anyone wanting to further their education along with decrease the expenses that most college campuses currently have.

I know we could not go completely online with all courses of study, but how much better would our environment be if we did?

[ top ]

Your Two Cents

What do you think? Let us know your opinion. Leave your comments.

[ top ]