YCC has recently announced its intentions to lobby for reforms so that students can save on textbook and material costs.  Here are some suggestions that I hope they’ll include in the e-mail they send out to the entire faculty.

1. Switch to paperback. Assigning only paperbacks would mean there would be no more $110 tomes to lug to class. And there finally might be a class that would have to assign the entirety of the Animorphs series. American Novel Since 1945?
2. Communal textbooks. It would be a hassle, sure, to share one textbook among 20 or so students, but if you had one really smart and committed kid to Half-Blood Prince the book, then midterms would be so much simpler for everybody else.
3. Have Yale pick up the tab. We still have the most endowment per student, anyway.
4. Government subsidizing. They already bought a whole bunch of people cars. Why not just go all the way Oprah and tell Yale students what books to read?  Yale could reciprocate by educating all of the U.S.’s presidents, like it already does.