Most
college students aren’t fully prepared to dig into their coursework on the
first day of class. In a new survey of 500 students, 72% said they held off on
acquiring some course materials until after the course was underway and 27%
never bothered to get materials at all for at least one course.
The
majority of students indicated cost was the reason for not obtaining their
course materials before classes started. The survey was conducted in May by
Wakefield Research for VitalSource Technologies, a provider of digital
textbooks.
NACS’
latest Student Watch survey, conducted in spring 2016, found very similar
results in a study of almost 17,000 college students. In both surveys, students
said they resorted to a variety of strategies in order to afford their
materials, including sharing them with others taking the same class, which can
create complications for effective studying and doing assignments.
In the
Wakefield study, respondents also liked the idea of folding the cost of course
materials into tuition, with 77% overall showing support for the concept.
