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The Cost of School

School is expensive. In time, mental effort, and money. I imagine my BA hanging on my wall in a nice, expensive frame and wonder at times if it's worth it. It is, to me at least, and I hope my kiddos will value the effort I made to educate myself. And do it themselves, preferably before they produce grandkids.

Yesterday we went by the college bookstore to price books. If we bought all new, and also adding in the cost of $100 of supplies, we'd be spending around $1200. If we bought used whenever we could it would drop to $1000. Using the new and very exciting textbook rental feature at Barnes & Noble.com, we drop it to $850.

To my disappointment, only one of our books came in eTextbook mode. That's a fairly new feature of the Nook, however, and they'll be expanding it every semester. In case you didn't know, the B&N Ivory Tower has been completely blown away by the success of the Nook in stores. I know in my store we continuously exceed sales expectations. Anyway, they're going to keep making it better and faster. I'm not sure cheaper is in the immediate future, but it's only $199 for 3G and WiFi ... We're thinking of finally buying one once our loans come in. Happy dance.

One of these days we'll post a copy of our schedule here so you can see the absolute madness that is our Fall schedule. No science class for me this time-3 history classes, 1 spanish, so I'm confident of good grades, but still. I have around 8 books already assigned for my history classes. And Damm's schedule is even worse, what with the ROTC requirements. And we're starting preschool with the Orclette ...

And on top of all that, I want to play WoW again. I'm not really sure when I could fit that in, but I've been dreaming of Azeroth again. And looking forward to Cataclysm.

Maybe I could sleep less?:)

Comments

bo-breaze said…
You can rejoin azeroth for samller periods of time. 30-45 minutes is enough for a dungeon or pvp if ques aren't to bad. I find if i do one lowbie wsg or AB it can satisfy my wow urges.
Phil Kelly said…
Have you checked stuff like half.com for the books? Ambra and I got just about all of ours there, and it would generally drop the price by way more than that amount.

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