Cutting Textbook Costs is High Priority for Campus - Katharine Webster, UMass Lowell

Montana Heise ’20 started out at UMass Lowell as a biology major. But sticker shock – the $800 cost of all the science and math textbooks she was required to purchase just for her first semester – helped push her out of biology and into a double-major in sociology and world languages and cultures. “It was a factor,” says Heise, who is paying her way through college with scholarships, a work-study job and loans. “You prioritize which books you’re going to buy. If you have to buy a book for the access code to take a test or do your homework, you buy it – but then you don’t buy other books. It’s horrible that you have to do that, because you’re at a disadvantage in those other classes.” https://www.uml.edu/news/stories/2019/textbooks.aspx