The beginning of the end...

"You know it's the beginning of Fall when we start closing the windows and it becomes better to stay inside than out." That's how Stephen Raudenbush opened his class today on Quantitative Methods In Educational Research. I beg to differ on two counts: 1) I love the Fall and hence would hate to close the windows. I'll take the Fall breeze over dry summer heat any day; 2) ergo, I'd rather be outside in the Fall than at any other time of the year. Who wouldn't? The leaves are turning these crazy colours, it's still considered medically sane to eat ice-cream outdoors, and the hotdog guy hasn't decided to move his truck to Southern California yet...

So anyway, it was a surprisingly painless introduction to Statistics. I would have been poised to slit my wrist and bleed myself dry had he thrown us a statistical problem to solve today, but he was amazingly forgiving to those amongst us who are math illiterate. He tossed a bunch of terms our way (he may have as well spoken in Croatian- they meant absolutely nothing to me...) but assured us that they would become second nature within the next 13 weeks. I was just about to congratulate myself on taking Stats with such a merciful instructor when he threw another curve our way: the textbook would cost $116.95 and the SPSS software, available at the low licensed price of $112.99!

Ok, so someone explain to me again the rationale of making grad students pay so much for textbooks? And I'm an international student at that! We pay out-of-state tuition, rent, living expenses and are still expected to fork out $300 each semester for textbooks? And in US dollars?? I actually have it better than Jude- he's in the technology field and I'm not even going to go into how much those textbooks cost- he'll throw a hissing fit and I won't be able to get through dinner tonight without him launching into a tirade about how this is a manifestation of the Republican administration's ineptitude in regulating the cost of higher education. So what does a woman do? She goes online and buys a used older edition for $12.95, plus taxes and shipping...