The holidays are over and if you're like me you might actually be feeling slightly financially stable due to Christmas and working all of the vacation time. Then you come back to school for the spring semester and those deep-ish pockets suddenly disappear because, surprise! First class of the day already wants me to buy a $165 access code in order to do my finance homework.

In addition, I might get off easy if I rent the textbook through Amazon for 50 bucks. So it's not even lunchtime yet and I'm already out over $200 with four more classes to attend. This should get interesting.

For lunch, I eat leftovers from home because it appears to be that all my hard-earned money will be going to textbooks and access codes this semester- so forget dining on campus or treating myself to Chick-Fil-A.

I'm all for college, I really am. Yet sometimes, I question if it's truly about the education, or for the big wigs to make money. For instance, I attend a university that charges a little over $200 a credit hour, and taking a full schedule is 15 credit hours, which equates to about $3,000 a semester. So each student will pay roughly $3,000 for tuition to be stuffed into a classroom with 100 other students and become a number for a teacher to lecture on the same powerpoint that he or she has been using for years, then charge between $150-200 for the access code to do the homework that the professor will never even glance at or grade because the computer does all of that for them. Add the cost of a textbook into the equation and at the end of the day, an additional $200-$300 is needed per class in order to excel with the necessary materials.

This is so wrong!

I understand that everyone needs to make money and nothing is free, but I think all of these extra costs associated with college are unnecessary. If I was in charge, there would be no such thing as an access code in order to do homework, students already don't want to do homework, and to make them pay for it on top of that is just criminal! I also believe there should be a system of the textbook pass-down in place.

For example, in the fall semester, there might be 50 students in a math class that each use a textbook. For the new 50 students taking that same class in the spring, the textbooks are then passed down to them and this cycle continues so no one is faced with the cost of having to buy 5 expensive textbooks each semester. But what do I know?!?

My textbook rant may just be a rant, but I do feel passionately about this issue and feel so ripped off at the beginning of each semester when I shell out my life savings for textbooks and access codes and I'm sure you all relate to that!